i 







Class 
Book. 



( '.OPVRIGHT DEPOSIT 



The Ethical Import 



DARWINISM 



The Ethical Import 



OF 



DARWINISM 



JACOB GOULD SCHUEMAN 

M.A. {Lond.), D.Sc. [Edinb.) 
SAGE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 
CHAKLES SCRIBNEK'S SONS 

18S7 



y 



** 
&+ 



Copyright, 1887, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROW8 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, 

NEW YORK. 












/*• 



JAMES MARTINEAU, D.D., LL.D., 

THE ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS HELPER OF TWO GENERATIONS, 

THIS STUDY OP EVOLUTIONARY MORALS 

IS INSCRIBED 

WITH THE GRATITUDE AND REVERENT AFFECTION 

OF 

AN OLD PUPIL 



PREFACE. 



There is a remark of Mrs. Carlyle's which has 
always seemed to me highly suggestive. "When 
asked to explain her manifest antipathy to Bishop 
Colenso, whom Mr. Froude had got invited to 
one of her tea-parties, she confessed that it arose 
in part from the anomalous appearance presented 
by "a man arrived at the years of discretion 
wearing an absurd little black-silk apron," and in 
part from the incongruity between that ecclesias- 
tical symbol and this particular bishop's " arith- 
metical confutation of the Bible ; " for, proceeds 
the philosophical lady, generalizing the causes of 
her unfavorable impressions, " it is the mixing up 
of things which is the Great Bad. " 

In what passes with us for the doctrine of evo- 
lution there is a mixture of science and specula- 
tion. Yet it is customary to serve it all up to- 
gether, so that the hungry soul must needs take 
all or none. The result for many minds is apt to 
be indigestion or starvation. But this cruel di- 



viii Preface. 

lemma might be escaped, if the fact and the fancy 
entering into current evolutionism were kept 
apart and dealt out separately. The mind's nat- 
ural craving for knowledge could then be satisfied 
without detriment ; for it is only when science is 
adulterated with nescience that it becomes un- 
wholesome and poisonous. 

The object of the present volume is to distin- 
guish between science and speculation in the ap- 
plication of Darwinism to morals. The results 
of evolutionary science in the domain of matter 
and in the domain of life are everywhere taken 
for granted; the philosophical and, more espe- 
cially, the ethical theories currently associated with 
them are subjected to the most searching scrutiny 
I have been able to make. As it has been pre- 
tended that the doctrine of evolution invests 
ethics with a new scientific character, I first ex- 
amine the various methods of ethics and attempt 
to determine under what conditions alone ethics 
can become a science. {This first chapter should 
he omitted by the general reader not interested in 
the logic of ethics.) Whether Darwinian ethics 
is a piece of science or of speculation appears in 
the sequel. But before the question is decided 
we must know what is meant by Darwinism. 
Accordingly, the second chapter gives an exposi- 



Preface. ix 

tion of the Darwinian theory, comparing and 
contrasting it with the more general doctrine of 
evolutionism, whose history and meaning are also 
briefly traced. Then follow chapters on the phil- 
osophical interpretation and the ethical bearings 
of Darwinism. The fifth chapter is devoted to 
an examination of the ethical speculations which 
Darwin grafted upon his biological science. 
These chapters confirming the conclusion reached 
in the first chapter, that a scientific^ as opposed to 
a speculative, ethic can be constructed only by 
adopting the historical method, the last chapter 
has to show what light maybe thrown upon ethi- 
cal problems by tracing the actual development of 
moral ideals and institutions, of which, for ob- 
vious reasons, the domestic virtues are here taken 
as typical illustration. 

The w r ork is primarily the outcome of my own 
reflective needs. It has cleared up in my own 
mind the confusion between guesses and facts, 
which is " the Great Bad " in evolutionary ethics. 
I am not without hope that it may also prove 
clarifying to other minds. Isot, of course, that 
I would presume to instruct trained philosophical 
experts ; but I have in view the increasingly 
large number of intelligent men and women w r ho, 
without making a special study of philosophy, 



x Preface. 

would fain comprehend the significance for 
morals of that evolutionary theory which has 
revolutionized modern science and culture. This 
alone would have been sufficient motive for the 
avoidance of obscure and technical phraseology 
and the cultivation of a popular style ; but, apart 
from that consideration, I hold that the first duty 
of any philosophical writer is to make himself 
generally intelligible, and I am of the opinion 
that there is no theory, or criticism, or system 
(not even Kant's or Hegel's), that cannot be clearly 
expressed in a language which in Locke's hands 
was strong and homely, in Berkeley's rich and 
subtle, in Hume's easy, graceful, and finished, 
and in all three alike plain, transparent, and un- 
mistakable. 

This study of Darwinism in ethics being so 
largely of a reflective character, reference to 
other works has not in general been considered 
necessary. I wish here, however, to acknowledge 
especially my indebtedness to Darwin, w T hose 
ethical speculations, illusory as I now hold them, 
I have found more stimulating than any other 
similar work since the time of Kant. 

J. G. S. 

Cornell University, August 22, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

METHODS OF ETHICS, EVOLUTIONARY AND OTHER. 

P 

Diversity of Ethical Theories — Need of a Critique of 
Ethics as a Science — Is Ethics a Science of the 
same Type as Logic ? It has not in general been 
so regarded— Locke's Conception of Ethics as a 
Demonstrative Science, like Mathematics, rests on 
a Misunderstanding of the Procedure of Mathe- 
matics, and it assumes, besides, Theological First 
Principles — Ethics as a Natural Science — Spen- 
cer's Reconstruction of Ethics on the Law of Uni- 
versal Causation, after the Model of Astronomy, an 
Illusion — Is Ethics, then, if not a Deductive, at 
least an Empirical, Physical Science ? — Its Limita- 
tions in Comparison with Biology — Ethics, as a 
Science, is a Branch of History — What passes for 
the " Science of Ethics " is a Medley of Specula- 
tions—The Highly Speculative Character of Cur- 
rent Naturalistic, Evolutionary Ethics — An Under- 
standing with Darwinism the Preliminary to a 
True Science of Historical Ethics — Transition to 
Examination of Darwinism in Ethics, 

CHAPTER II. 

EVOLUTIONISM AND DARWINISM. 

"The Origin of Species" — Popular View of Darwin- 
ism—Antiquity of the Conception of Evolution — 



xii Contents, 

PAGE 

Five Points of the Modern Theory anticipated by 
the Greeks —Introduction of the Notion of Evolu- 
tion into Modern Science by Kant, Goethe, Eras- 
mus Darwin, Saint Hilaire, Lamarck, and Lyell — 
The Problem of Darwin — Importance of his Ob- 
servations on the Formation of Domestic Breeds 
by Man's Conscious Selection — Natural Selection 
suggested by Malthus's Essay — Fecundity of Or- 
ganisms—Struggle for Life —Survival of Favored 
Individuals begins the Formation of Species — 
Man's Relation to the Apes — Darwinism distin- 
guished from Evolutionism — How regarded by 
Helmholtz, Virchow, Wallace, and Huxley — Net 
Result — Significance for Ethics — Dread of Science 
an Anachronism, , . 40 



CHAPTER III. 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL, INTERPRETATION OF THE DARWIN- 
IAN HYPOTHESIS. 

Darwin gives a Scientific Explanation of the Origin of 
Species — Need of a Philosophical Analysis of that 
Explanation — Significance of the Variations on 
which Natural Selection works — They originate, 
ultimately, in the Nature of the Organism — They 
are Indefinite, according to Darwin, but the 
Theory of Natural Selection does not require 
that View, which is not shared by Huxley and Asa 
Gray — Natural Selection is the Scientific Account 
of the Accumulation of Favorable Variations into 
Specific Characters, but the Phrase is apt to mis- 
lead through Metaphorical Associations — Specula- 
tive License of the Darwinists — What is explained 
and what is still left a Mystery by Natural Selec- 
tion — Human and Natural Selection dependent 
upon Transcendent Causation — J^arwin's Pro- 



Contents. xiii 

PAGE 

fessed Theism — His Mechanical Philosophy — 
Teleology and Darwinism— Evolutionism for- 
merly Teleological — Has the Instinct of the 
Cuckoo a Fortuitous Origin ? — Natural Selection, 
not a Creative, but a Sifting Process — Does not 
explain the Formation of the Eye — Variations 
being predetermined imply Teleology — Fortuity 
an Accident in Darwinism, . . . . 74 

CHAPTER IV. 

DARWINISM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OP MORALS. 

The Problem— The Moment of Utility in Natural Se- 
lection — The Utility of Intelligence and Morality 
— Evolutionary Biology leads to Utilitarian Ethics 
— Utilitarianism Old and New — Evolutiono util- 
itarianism explains the Innateness, Simplicity, 
Universality, and Obligation of Moral Laws — What 
Evolutiono -utilitarianism assumes : first, the 
Derivative Character of Morality ; secondly, the 
Ultimateness of Pleasure or some other End ; 
thirdly, the Fortuitous Origin of Morality 
through a Process purely Mechanical — Man an 
Automaton, with Intelligence and Conscience as 
Accidents— Speculative Objections — Practical Ob- 
jections drawn from our Sense of Duty and Right 
— But this Sense explained away by Spencer and 
Guyau — Fallacy in their Theory of its Origin and 
Future Decline — Mechanical Metaphysics, not 
Evolutionary Science, their Basis— Darwinism 
compatible with a Non-mechanical and Non-for- 
tuitous Theory of Conscience — Evolution rot 
involution — Conscience compared with the 
Eye and with the Intellect — Ail Useful because 
they reveal Facts, but not therefore mere 
Utilities, .115 



xiv Contents. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE ETHICAL SPECULATIONS OF DARWIN. 

PAGE 

Darwin's Difficulty with Intelligence and Conscience — 
Probability of their Evolution — Comparison of 
Human and Animal Instincts, Emotions, Intellect- 
ual Powers, Progressiveness, Skill, and Speech — 
Conscience a Greater Barrier — Origin of Con- 
science — Animal Sociability — The Social Instincts 
being more present and persistent than the Self- 
ish, if violated, generate under Reflection the 
Feeling of Remorse, or Conscience — Darwin's 
Treatment of Conscience compared with his 
Treatment of Life and Mind : that Speculative, 
this Scientific — Possible Objection to his Mental 
Science ; Insuperable Objection to his Ethics — In- 
conceivability of an absolute beginning of Con- 
• science — Darwin takes Intelligence and (in his 
Theory of Sexual Selection) the ^Esthetic Faculty 
Ready-made : only of Conscience does he venture 
the Creation— Ambiguity in his use of " Con- 
science, " and the consequent Perplexity — Con- 
science identified with Remorse — How the Theory 
fails to account for even this Conscience — For the 
Social Instincts are not more persistent and pres- 
ent ; and if they were, to follow them would bring 
Satisfaction, not Remorse, to a Non-moral Being 
— This Fact not alterable by Reflection — Dar- 
win derives Conscience from what tacitly im- 
plies it, ...... 161 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OP MORAL IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS, 
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE FAMILY. 

Darwin's Service to Historical Ethics indirect — History 
of Morals and Ethical Theories — The Family and 



Contents. xv 

PAGE 

Domestic Virtues — McLennan's Theory of the 
Evolution of the Family — Form of Capture, Wife- 
stealing, Exogamy. Infanticide, Kinship through 
Females— Fallacy of supposing a Universal, Uni- 
form Development — Absolute Promiscuity a mere 
Fancy — The Facts of Infanticide, Wife stealing, 
Polyandry, Exogamy, do not warrant McLeiman's 
Conclusions— Morgan's Theory — Infers Family 
from System of Relationship— The Malayan Sys- 
tem gives the Consanguine Family, and the Tura- 
nian the Punaluan — The Pairing, the Patriarchal, 
and the Monogamous Families — Aryan System of 
Relationship— This Theory follows the Process of 
Logical Determination rather than Historical Facts 
— Consanguine Family, on which all depends, a 
Baseless Myth — Malayan System of Relationship 
not based on Blood-ties ; it is merely a Classifica- 
tion of Generations — Xor would the Consanguine 
Family account for it — Explanation of the Tura- 
nian System different from Morgan's — The other 
Families examined — Difficulty of determining the 
Development of the Family — Fallacy in Professor 
Robertson Smith's Method — Facts, not Theories, 
concern the Moralist — Some Facts concerning 
Limited Promiscuity, Kinship through Females, 
Settling in the Tent of the Woman, Infidelity, 
Maidenly Inchastity, Sale of Wives, Incest — 
Chastity not a part of the Content of the Moral 
Law Universal — But even the Relativist must 
agree that the Moral Law has some Absolute Con- 
tent — Testimony of Civilized and Uncivilized Mo- 
rality — Points of Difference explained — The Posi- 
tion of Woman — Her Glory under the Roman 
Empire — Her Present and Future Position — The 
Operation of Divorce overlooked — Science cannot 
tell what ought to be, . , . 201 



ETHICAL IMPORT OF DARWINISM. 



CHAPTER I. 

METHODS OF ETHICS, EVOLUTIONARY AND OTHER, 

Nothing can be more perplexing to anyone re- 
flecting upon the unanimity of men's moral judg- 
ments than the diversity and contrariety of the 
theories founded upon them. The incongruity is 
as palpable as it is startling. Nor is it much, if at 
all, relieved by the qualification of varying moral 
belief and practice, which a more extended survey 
of humanity, past and present, obliges us to make 
in our first generalization. For if human moral- 
ity is not at all times and in all places absolutely 
identical, it is rather in minor details or in unex- 
pected applications of common principles that 
there is any considerable deviation from the uni- 
versal type. Besides, this divergency cannot be 
the origin of our opposing ethical theories, since 
were it to vanish, they would still remain. And, 



2 Diversity of Ethical Theories. 

indeed, it is a simple matter of history that the 
antinomies of our ethical systems have not origi- 
nated in a distinct consciousness of differences in 
moral codes, for these systems are almost always 
theories, not of varying universal morality, but 
of the common morality of the modern civilized 
world. The contrast, therefore, between the uni- 
formity of moral data and the diversity of so- 
called moral sciences suffers no diminution from 
the circumstance that that uniformity may be to 
some extent relative. The broad fact remains, 
that while all are agreed that certain courses of 
conduct are right and the opposite wrong, moral- 
ists seem unable to agree in anything except the 
contradictory claim of building their incompatible 
theories upon these universally recognized propo- 
sitions. 

There can be no question about the existence 
of this fundamental antinomy. It is admitted, 
or rather it is accentuated, by the ablest writers 
on morals. Nor has any attempt, I believe, ever 
been made to explain it away. But while it is 
mentioned as a commonplace, and put aside as if 
from fear of demonstrating a truism, its conse- 
quences have been steadily overlooked. No one 
has inquired whether a subject-matter which has 
begotten such contradictions really admits of 



Methods of Ethics. 3 

scientific treatment at all. Schleiermacher is 
scarcely an exception, since his profound and pen- 
etrating critique is rather a dialectical exposition 
of moral principles and ideas than a logical in- 
vestigation into the requirements of a moral sci- 
ence. Yet the question is surely of primary im- 
portance. We cannot think so meanly of science 
as to believe it possible for the same problem to 
have opposite solutions. The history of ethics, 
however, presents us with this incredibility. Is, 
then, ethics a science ? This question, unfortu- 
nately, was not raised by Kant. Had it occurred 
to him his legacy to future ages would scarcely 
have included, along with a demonstration of the 
impossibility of metaphysics, an actual metaphysic 
of ethics. But the errors of great thinkers are 
scarcely less instructive than their perfect achieve- 
ments. And Kant's critique of our d priori 
knowledge suggests the kind of inquiry from 
which ethics can no longer be withheld. When, 
along with the possibility of pure mathematics 
and physics, he asks, How is metaphysics in 
general possible ? and, How is metaphysics as a 
science possible? he formulates the very ques- 
tions which, mutatis mutandis, the history of 
modern ethics and the logic of the sciences alike 
make incumbent upon contemporary moralists. 



4 Need of a Critique. 

And until these questions on the possibility of 
their science are answered, they should (to ap- 
propriate Kant's language) be solemnly and 
legally suspended from their present dubious oc- 
cupation. 

It may be objected, however, that we have 
prejudged the question of the actual existence of 
ethics as a science in accepting the adverse prima 
facie evidence drawn from the number and the 
opposition of ethical theories. The same diver- 
sity, it will be alleged, is found in other sciences 
whose validity no one thinks of doubting. In 
fact, putting aside, on the one hand, the purely 
observational sciences (if there be any, for chem- 
istry is no longer one), in which demonstration 
lias not begun, and, on the other hand, the math- 
ematical sciences, in which it is complete, it will 
be hard to find any intervening science which is, 
and has been, wholly exempt from the contradic- 
tions of opposing hypotheses. In natural history, 
for instance, our own generation has " assisted " 
at the liveliest disputations concerning the nature 
and origin of species ; and our fathers witnessed, 
in the domain of physics, a struggle scarcely less 
bitter between the corpuscular and the undulatory 
theories of light. Mathematics even has been 
in the past the scene of like encounters ; for 



Methods of Ethics. 5 

though the analytical geometry of Descartes pre- 
vailed without opposition, a fierce warfare w r as 
waged over the comparative merits of the fluxions 
of Xewton and the calculus of Leibnitz. And 
(to have done with illustration) the Ptolemaic 
and the Copernican hypotheses long held the 
field together as rival systems in astronomy. 
Yet, in the face of such radical opposition of 
theories, it was never maintained that the sciences 
of astronomy, mathematics, physics, and biology 
were illusory, or even impossible. Should not the 
examples be a warning to us against inferring 
over-hastily the illegitimacy of ethical science ? 

And yet there is a difference. Those oppo- 
sitions, as we know, have been ultimately set at 
rest, while ethics remains the scene of perpet- 
ual antinomies. Where the controversies have 
not been laid, as, for instance, in political econ- 
omy, the legitimacy of the science has actually 
been denied. To ethics alone belongs the excep- 
tional prerogative of ranking as a science while 
retaining for subject- njatter the still unsettled 
questions which three-and-twenty centuries ago 
were already themes of discussion among the 
savants of the Hellenic world. 

What, then, constitutes a science ? If this can 
be determined, we shall be in a position to decide 



6 What is Science f 

upon the scientific pretensions of ethics. We 
cannot define science, however, until the very 
point at issue is settled — whether that term is to 
denote, along with the various branches of our 
systematic knowledge of natural phenomena and 
their quantitative relations, such disciplines as 
logic, dialectic, ethics, and metaphysics. Certain- 
ly the oldest known classification of the sciences 
embraced logic, ethics, and physics. And apart 
from the sciences themselves, we have no royal 
rule of exclusion or admission. In doubtful 
cases, therefore, the only course open to us is to 
compare the branches whose scientific character 
is questioned, with others whose scientific char- 
acter is impeachable. 

First of all, then, following the ancient classi- 
fication, ethics may be compared with logic. 
Now, logic is the science of reasoning, taking that 
term in its broadest sense. In other words, it is 
the theory of the ascertainment of reasoned or 
inferred truth. It does not undertake to find 
reasons, but to determine what is required to con- 
stitute them, to point out the conditions to wdiich 
all facts must conform in order that they may 
serve as proof or evidence. But these conditions 
are not deduced from any transcendent source. 
They are simply the rules which men observe in 



Methods of Ethics. 7 

the reasonings and inferences of their every-day 
life, without reflection, or even without distinct 
consciousness. Logic, accordingly, gives us no 
new information. It merely makes explicit for 
reflection what was already implicit in cognition. 
But our stock of knowledge is not increased by 
an analysis of the processes whereby it has been 
obtained. My syllogistic reasonings, my assump- 
tion of universal causation, my deductive and ex- 
perimental investigations may proceed now, as 
they did originally, in utter independence of a 
logical formulation of them. 

Is ethics, now, a science of this character? 
Some analogy, at least, lies upon the surface. 
As logic analyzes and classifies the processes of 
thought, so ethics may be regarded as a system- 
atic exhibition of the phenomena of conscience. 
It has not to determine of itself the nature of 
good or evil, but simply to observe, collect, and 
classify the moral experience of mankind. Its 
observations should be true, its collections ex- 
haustive, its classifications systematic. The re- 
sult, among other things, would include a list of 
virtues, such as temperance, fortitude, etc., or a 
table of duties, such as duties to friends, to the 
state, to humanity. But an ethical science so re- 
stricted, it would, I think, be difficult, if not im- 



8 Ethics compared with Logic. 

possible, to find anywhere realized. Moralists 
have deemed it a part of their business to in- 
quire into the foundations of moral judgments, 
and even, in some cases, to correct and improve 
them. It is as though logicians should under- 
take to establish, or even to remodel, those laws of 
thought which they have hitherto accepted from 
the general consciousness of mankind. Such in- 
quiries no more belong to logic than an inquiry 
into the nature of space or the evidence of the 
axioms belongs to geometry. And if ethics is to 
take rank with logic as a science of pure observa- 
tion and analysis, it must be purged of these ex- 
traneous questions that range beyond the limits 
of description and classification. With this limi- 
tation of its subject-matter would come, no doubt, 
a diminution of interest ; since it has been pre- 
cisely by the problems thus excluded that morals 
have always fascinated the deepest thinkers, and 
withheld them (Aristotle alone excepted) from es- 
saying a descriptive ethics, the lack of which, as 
when Bacon first deplored it, we must still make 
good by the concrete illustrations of dramatic 
poetry. But I am not maintaining that ethics 
should be curtailed. I am concerned only with 
its scientific character. And I think it evident 
that, though ethics may, for all that, be a legiti- 



Methods of Ethics. 9 

mate science, it cannot claim to be a science of 
the same type as logic, without at least foregoing 
the problems which have hitherto constituted its 
principal subject-matter. 

Can ethics, then, be likened to mathematics? 
Between this science and logic there are striking 
points of contrast. Mathematics reasons about 
real existence in its most general aspects of space 
and time and number; logic deals only with the 
empty forms of reasoning. Both start with fun- 
damental principles of intelligence ; but the pro- 
cedure in one case is analytic, in the other syn- 
thetic. In logic, consequently, there is no subse- 
quent advance upon the initial laws of thought, 
w r ith which everything else is given ; but in math- 
ematics the axioms and definitions are, by con- 
structive imagination or synthetic insight into new 
relations, realized into a body of demonstrations, 
which are not less certain than the first prin- 
ciples, but of which these gave no anticipation or 
prophetic hint. A real science thus formed by the 
mind out of its own resources, in utter indepen- 
dence of sense, is too captivating an ideal for the 
genius of speculation to resist ; and it has been the 
model of the systems at least of Plato and Spinoza. 
Even a mind so sober and cautious as Locke's 
did not escape the fascination, and that, too, with 



io Ethics compared with Mathematics. 

regard to ethics. Though he never undertook the 
task, and when urged to it, late in life, by his 
friend Molyneux, declined on the ground of a 
preference for the practical morals of the New 
Testament, Locke nevertheless tells us, more than 
once, and maintains, in accordance with his doc- 
trine of the self-archetypal character of complex 
ideas, that the rules of morality may be demonstrat- 
ed in the same manner, and with the same evi- 
dence, as the propositions of geometry. He recog- 
nizes, as compared with moral ideas, the greater 
simplicity of mathematical ideas, and their repre- 
sentability by diagrams or other sensible marks ; 
and though he admits this gives to the ideas of 
quantity a real practical advantage, and has made 
them thought more capable of certainty and dem- 
onstration, he yet emphatically reiterates that 
"from self-evident propositions by necessary con- 
sequences, as incontestable as those in mathematics, 
the measures of right and wrong might be made 
out to anyone that will apply himself with the same 
indifferency and attention to the one as he does to 
the other of these sciences." What, then, are 
these " self-evident propositions" which constitute 
the foundations of our duty and rules of action ? If 
we look for anything so simple and evident as the 
axioms, definitions, and postulates of geometry, we 



Methods of Ethics. 1 1 

shall be much deceived. Far more than this is 
included in those first principles in virtue of which 
morality is to be placed amongst the sciences 
capable of demonstration. They comprise "the 
idea of a Supreme Being, infinite in power, good- 
ness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, 
and on whom w T e depend ; and the idea of our- 
selves, as understanding, rational beings." 

But the admission of even such principles does 
not assimilate the scientific character of ethics to 
that of mathematics. It seems to do so only be- 
cause of the inveterate, though ungrounded, habit 
of regarding mathematical truths as deductions 
from given first principles. So long as the theo- 
rems of geometry and algebra are imagined to 
follow from the axioms and definitions with the 
same inner necessity as a syllogistic conclusion 
from its major and minor premises, so long must 
the procedure of mathematics appear applicable 
to ethics when once the latter has discovered suit- 
able starting-points. For both sciences are thus 
conceived as merely specialized forms of logic. 
This, however, is to overlook precisely the essen- 
tial point. If ratiocination in ethics, as in logic, 
gives us no new information, leaving us in the 
issue exactly where we stood at the outset, there 
is, on the contrary, in the demonstrations of 



12 



\ockes Mathematical Method. 



mathematics a constant advance upon previous 
attainment, so that each new result is an original 
addition to what went before, not, as in logic, a 
mere explication of it. Every mathematical prop- 
osition, being the expression of a fresh insight, 
of a brand-new perception of relations, by the 
synthetic activity of the mind, has its voucher, 
not in antecedent truths, but in the immediate 
affirmation of that constructive intelligence by 
which those truths in continuous regression to the 
axioms have been evidenced and maintained. It 
is not, therefore, as Locke supposed, merely a 
lack of first principles from which ethics suffers 
in comparison with mathematics. Ethics is fatally 
handicapped in quite a different way. In the 
spatial relations, e.g., with which geometry deals, 
the mind has the power (prior to sense-experi- 
ence, too) of making intuitive discoveries, of con- 
structing, as it were, by its own native activity, a 
genuine science (which is afterwards found valid 
for the objects of perception). The geometer, 
accordingly, knows a great deal more about the 
relations of space than the rest of mankind do. 
But the moralist can tell us nothing new about 
morality. The sciences begun by Euclid and 
Archimedes have been so extended in the course 
of eighty generations that the most arduous study 



Methods of Eth ics. 1 3 

of a lifetime often fails to cover the range of 
their original discoveries. But the science begun 
by Socrates is still unfounded ; and every school- 
boy knows as much about morals as the greatest 
ethical philosophers, though among them have 
been included the noblest geniuses of humanity. 
The subject-matter of ethics does not, like mathe- 
matics, admit of progressive determination by the 
synthetic intuition of the mind. And the rea- 
son, since Kant's time, is not far to seek. Good- 
ness is not, like space, a constitutive, dprioriiorm 
of our sensuous experience. Any new proposi- 
tions you make about it, therefore, can never be 
actualized into fact ; they remain a dialectical 
exercise, or even a play of words. And so long 
as that is so, no supply of first principles can con- 
fer upon ethics the scientific character of mathe- 
matics ; they stand as widely apart as analysis of 
the known and synthesis of the unknown ; and if 
you persist in calling them both demonstrative, 
you must not overlook the vital difference that 
the mathematician demonstrates by direct insight 
into new relations, the moralist solely by unfold- 
ing what is already taken for granted. In the 
nature of things, therefore, Locke's well-meant 
attempt to introduce the procedure of mathemat- 
ics into ethics was doomed to miscarry. 



14 Locke s First Principles. 

It follows, too, that in the analytic deduction 
of moral rules from Locke's first principles — the 
idea of a Supreme Being, on whom we depend, and 
of ourselves as rational beings — the difficulties at- 
taching to our conception of moral rules are not 
removed, but simply refunded into the assumed 
first principles. If they are not immediately vis- 
ible there it is only because the assumptions are 
so much vaster than this particular application of 
them that our special problem is overshadowed 
by the larger issues to which its solution has 
given rise. But a moment's reflection will show 
that the debated points of morals cannot be made 
to disappear, even at the theistic point of view. 
And it is a matter of history that theistic moral- 
ists fall into the same ethical antagonisms as the 
sceptics do. Paley and Butler, Edwards and Kant, 
are, in some respects, as fundamental oppositions 
as the whole history of ethics presents. 

Nor is the fact really surprising. For the idea 
of a Supreme Being, on whom man depends, con- 
tains no information about man's moral nature, 
or the end of his conduct, or his specific duties 
and obligations. You cannot deduce from that 
idea the character of conscience or will ; it does 
not supply you with a standard of morality ; it 
does not show you in particular cases what you 



Methods of Eth ics. 1 5 

ought to do. It is an extraneous form, into which 
you pour the whole ethical content, be that con- 
tent what it may. Morality is not a deduction 
from theism, but theism a superinduction upon 
morality. It is only by observation, analysis, and 
reflection we can discover wherein man's moral 
life consists. And the results thus experientially 
established would never have been mistaken for 
deductions, had men kept in view the distinction 
between knowledge and the supposed vouchers 
of it, between the ratio cognoscendi and the al- 
leged ratio essendi. The idea of a Supreme 
Being is not, nor can it be (as Locke held), the 
ratio cognoscendi of morality. Whether it can be 
the ratio essendi is another point which we need 
not here discuss, but which, though granted, 
would be a fruitless admission in the face of scep- 
tical and agnostic science. Theological ethics 
cannot get under way at all without proving the 
existence of God ; but neither that nor any other 
superior principle can endow ethics witli the 
demonstrative character of mathematics. 

It has now been shown that ethics is not a 
science of the type of logic or mathematics. The 
next thing is to compare it with tUe natural and 
historical sciences. If its scientific character pre- 
sents no analogy or only a partial analogy to 



1 6 Ethics and the Natural Sciences. 

theirs, then nothing remains but to point out its 
unique nature, and inquire finally whether ethics 
be not less a science than a branch of speculation ? 
In the meantime, however, we must not forget, 
and may derive hope from, the current fashion 
of identifying the science of morals with the 
sciences of nature. Though mathematical ethics 
be a vision, who shall say that physical ethics may 
not become an actuality ? 

The sciences of nature have been classified as 
deductive or experimental. Originally they were 
all experimental ; their laws expressing only 
those particular uniformities which observation 
and experiment showed to exist, but giving no 
reasons for their existence. Such an empirical 
law we have, e.g., in the tendency of hot water 
to break glass. Now, when the particular em- 
pirical laws of a science can be brought into re- 
lation to more general laws, seen to be special 
applications of them, and so deducible f rom them, 
that science passes from the experimental to the 
deductive stage. The cracking of glass by hot 
water, for example, takes its place as a phenom- 
enon of deductive science as soon as it has been 
shown that heat tends to expand all substances, 
that the crack is due to the expansion of the 
heated portion in spite of the adjacent cooler por- 



Methods of Ethics. 17 

tion, and that no crack would have occurred had 
the heat been equally diffused as in thin glass 
vessels through which it passes rapidly. The 
illustration suggests that deductive science, hav- 
ing apprehended the reasons of phenomena, may 
be able to predict their occurrence ; and every- 
body is acquainted with the sublime prophetic 
achievements of astronomy. This power of pre- 
diction clearly marks off the deductive from the 
experimental sciences. And so much being 
premised, we are now prepared for the inquiry 
whether ethics belongs to either division ? If it 
be of the same general type as the sciences of 
nature, it must be either a deductive or an experi- 
mental science. 

In assigning ethics to either of these classes, 
however, one assumption is made too significant 
to pass without distinct mention. The sciences of 
nature all rest upon the presupposition that events 
tollow one another in a fixed and regular order, 
that the same cause under the same circumstances 
always produces the same effects, that the entire 
realm of natural phenomena is subject to the 
reign of inexorable law. Deny the principle of 
universal causation, and natural science is smitten 
with paralysis. You may be in doubt about the 
proof of the principle ; you may attempt to for- 



1 8 1 he Law of Causation. 

tify its validity by a priori deduction, like Kant, 
or by observation, like Mill, or you may, like 
Lotze, confess it is the indemonstrable postulate 
of all our knowledge ; but you cannot for a mo- 
ment fail to see that the law, however it may 
be established, is indispensable to the natural 
and physical sciences, which presuppose it at 
every step. 

Now, to say that ethics is a science of the same 
type as botany or astronomy is to assert that the 
methods of investigation applicable to the latter 
are equally suited to the former, and consequently 
that constancy of causation, which is the founda- 
tion of those methods, must obtain among moral 
phenomena with the same rigorous invariability 
as among the events of nature. Nor can anyone 
at all alive to the drift of contemporary thought 
and culture have failed to observe the prevalent 
acceptance of this determinism, especially on the 
part of the ever increasing number of scientific 
inquirers. Schopenhauer, indeed, erected the 
dogma into a test of mental vigor, and maintained, 
with characteristic asperity and assurance, that 
none but intellectual dwarfs could be libertarians. 
At the present day the triumphant reign of 
physical science has begotten a distrust in meta- > 
physical ethics; and men have turned their gaze 



Methods of Ethics. 19 

from the noumenal freedom in which Kant found 
the sine qua non of duty, to look for a basis of 
morality in the sensible facts of the phenomenal 
world. And it is really claimed that, after the 
lapse of so many barren centuries of ethical logom- 
achy, the science of morals has at last been set 
upon an immovable foundation through the dis- 
covery that human conduct is subject to necessary 
relations of cause and effect, from which all moral 
rules are ultimately deduced. 

This bold reconstruction of ethics on the'law of 
universal causation, after the model of a deductive 
science like astronomy, has been attempted by 
Mr. Herbert Spencer. Unfortunately, however, 
of Mr. Spencer's promised "Principles of Mo- 
rality," only the first part — the " Data of Ethics" 
— has yet appeared; and this instalment, though 
postulating for ethics an immediate evolution, like 
that which in the course of centuries transformed 
empirical into rational astronomy, does not de- 
monstrate the possibility of such a development, 
still less accomplish it, or even make its accom- 
plishment very credible to anyone who can re- 
sist the contagion of the evolutionist's scientific 
optimism. When the work is completed, it will 
be easier to judge how far Mr. Spencer has suc- 
ceeded in deducing moral rules from first princi- 



20 Mr. Spencer s Demonstrative Method. 

pies. In the meantime, one who sees in the un- 
dertaking merely a repetition of the fruitless 
attempt of Locke may be allowed to recall 
Hume's deprecation of the application of deduc- 
tion to ethics on the ground that this method, 
though in itself more perfect, was less suited to 
the imperfection of human nature, and was a 
common source of illusion and mistake in this as 
well as in other subjects. But whatever the 
future may disclose regarding the deducibility of 
rules of conduct, it is clear that deductive ethics, 
if it is to be a science, must not start with as- 
sumptions unwarranted by, or even opposed to, the 
common-sense of mankind. The first principles 
of astronomy and physics are indisputable; if 
ethics is to take rank with them, its first principles 
must be equally axiomatic. But Mr. Spencer, 
under the influence of what Mill has called an a 
priori fallacy, the offspring of hedonism and 
utilitarianism, lays the foundation of his science 
of rational, deductive, absolute ethics in the dog- 
matic identification of goodness with pleasure. 
He holds it " to be the business of moral science 
to deduce, from the laws of life and the condi- 
tions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily 
tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to pro- 
duce unhappiness. Having done this, its deduc- 



Methods of Ethics. 21 

tions are to be recognized as laws of conduct." 
But that moral rules have no other foundation 
than their felicific consequences is so far from 
self-evident, so foreign to popular thought and 
modes of expression, to say nothing of moral 
philosophy, that the proposition could only 
emerge as a final result, not stand as the first 
datum, of a truly scientific ethics. Accordingly, 
the scientific character of morals — and it is that 
we are now investigating — will not be affected by 
the contingent issues of Mr. Spencer's venture- 
some enterprise. Should he, like Locke, fail in 
his promised deduction of rules of conduct, the so- 
called " rational ethics" will have lost its doughti- 
est champion ; should he succeed, his deductions 
will afford no proof of the evolution of empirical 
into rational ethics until it has first been estab- 
lished that the logical movement has really been 
in the ethical sphere — that is, until it has been 
shown that the counsels of prudence and precepts 
of utility, which he professes to have deduced 
from the laws of life and the conditions of exist- 
ence, are synonymous w T ith the moral laws intui- 
tively recognized by mankind. But this, unfor- 
tunately, has been a qucestio vexata since the very 
beginning of moral philosophy, and it is ap- 
parently no nearer settlement to-day than at its 



22 Empirical Ethics. 

first discussion between the youthful Socrates and 
the venerable Protagoras, when, in the whirl of 
debate, the protagonists were unwittingly carried 
round to opposite sides, and each was in the issue 
amazed to find himself attacking the position he 
deemed impregnable and espousing the cause he 
repudiated as false. 

But there are, as we have seen, two types of 
the sciences of nature — the deductive and the 
empirical — represented respectively by astrono- 
my and botany. And if at present ethics cannot 
claim to rank with the deductive, may it not 
at least find a place among the natural sciences 
of the empirical kind ? Failing to justify this 
position, ethics, it would seem, must be stripped 
of its scientific pretensions, and banished to that 
dim region of ontological abstractions which ag- 
nostic metaphysicians keep for their gnostic rivals 
— a limbo of intellectual inanities, of ghosts of 
human speculation (partitas vanitatum), which, 
like the unaccomplished works of nature, re- 
mains forever " abortive, monstrous, or unkindly 
mixed." 

There is, however, reason to believe that physical 
ethics, empirical if not deductive, is by no means 
an impossibility. It is certain that, apart from 
Mr. Spencer, this is the method of ethics generally 



Methods of Ethics. 23 

adopted by the evolutionists. Eschewing every at- 
tempt to deduce moral rules for the guidance of 
conduct, they institute an inquiry into the origin 
of that morality by which human life is actually 
regulated. It is not their business to tell men how 
they should act, or to supply them with motives for 
originating or principles for regulating their be- 
havior, still less to mete out esteem and affec- 
tion or hatred and contempt upon what may be 
considered the estimable or the blameable quali- 
ties of men. On the contrary, their aim is 
purely theoretical. They seek only the genesis of 
those moral notions, beliefs, and practices, which 
constitute an obvious phenomenon of the life 
of man. As there is an anatomy of the body, 
which resolves limbs into tissues and tissues 
into cells, and a physiology, that represents the 
modes in which the functions of the body are per- 
formed, so there may be a physiology and anat- 
omy of conscience, to inquire into its operations, 
to dissect complex moral phenomena into simple 
elements, and finally, under the guidance of 
evolution, to track these elements to their last 
hiding-place in the physical constitution and en- 
vironment of the lower animals. The natural 
history of moral phenomena may still be unwrit- 
ten ; but if it be true, as logicians tell us, that 



24 Analogy with Physical Science. 

any facts which follow one another according to 
constant laws are in themselves fitted to be a sub- 
ject of science, why deny the scientific character 
of an investigation whose ideal is to follow the 
development of morality from its earliest rudi- 
ments and to ascertain the order of antecedence 
and consequence in the series of intervening 
phenomena ? Physical ethics, based on the law 
of universal causation, applies to morality the 
same method of investigation as biology has used 
for the elucidation of the true relations of the 
phenomena of life ; and on whatever ground we 
term the one a science, the other would seem 
entitled to the same appellation. 

Nevertheless there is a striking difference, if 
not in the intrinsic character, in the external con- 
dition of these two sciences. Biology, as natural 
history of life, is an achievement ; physical ethics, 
as natural history of morals, is a dream. It may 
be that the aspiration of the scientific moralist is 
a genuine prophecy, that his vision is an inspira- 
tion of the faculty divine ; but it must be ad- 
mitted that in the meantime his ideal of a science 
of ethics is unrealized. And this negative in- 
stance is sufficiently striking to give pause to our 
scientific enthusiasm. 

Let us consider the matter a little more closely. 



Methods of Ethics. 25 

It will be conceded that, so far as observation 
and classification go, moral phenomena are not 
less manageable than biological ; and in this re- 
spect both sciences stand on the same level as 
logic and psychology. At the next stage, how- 
ever, a difference emerges. After biological 
phenomena have been noted and grouped, they 
may be resolved into simpler elements, as the tis- 
sue, e.g., into cells. And in chemistry, though 
obviously not in biology, it is possible to verify 
the analysis by a reproduction of the complex 
through synthesis of its resultant elements. But 
moral phenomena are not susceptible of a similar 
analysis. Every resolution of morality, or of any 
part of it, into something else must needs be arti- 
ficial and arbitrary. You do not here know what 
is simple and what compound. In this respect 
ethics falls behind even psychology in its amena- 
bility to scientific methods. The psychologist, 
starting from the side of objective science, is wont 
to take sensation as his datum, and from that 
stand-point is justified in regarding it as better 
known than any other mental experience ; so that 
an explanation of the higher intellectual pro- 
cesses and products may always be given by re- 
solving them into this datum, as when Hobbes, 
following Aristotle, describes imagination as u de- 



26 Comparison with Biology. 

caying sense." Beyond sensation, psychology does 
not go ; but psycho-physics shows that an appar- 
ently simple sensation is itself made up of ele- 
ments — Leibnitz's ypetites perceptions — which may 
be expressed for science in terms of the stimuli 
in which they originate. But this regressive 
analysis of the more complex into the less com- 
plex, until indecomposable factors are at last 
reached, cannot be applied to moral phenomena 
without making arbitrary and unwarrantable as- 
sumptions. This limitation of ethics, inherent in 
its subject-matter, is constantly overlooked ; and 
to the ignoring of it is due the diverse and mut- 
ually confuting systems of derivative morals. 

The farther we remove from simple observa- 
tion and classification, the greater is the differ- 
ence between the scientific character of ethics 
and biology. And to the disadvantage already 
noticed we have now to add another, which goes 
to the very root of the matter in hand, and 
seems to negate the possibility of turning the 
ideal of physical ethics into an actuality. When 
the biologist, besides dissecting complex phenom- 
ena into their elements, also demonstrates in a 
long series of forms, existent or extinct, the grad- 
ual building up of the complex organisms out of 
the simpler (by means, as he believes, of natural 



Methods of Ethics. 27 

selection), he appeals, not to imagination, but to 
observation ; for the successive growths are act- 
ually open to view on the surface of the earth or 
in its fossiliferous strata. He may be wrong in 
his explanation of the process of development — 
and it is not improbable that natural selection is 
not the only or even the chief agency ; but about 
the existence of a series of related forms that 
have followed one another through the lapse of 
vast geological epochs there cannot be a particle 
of doubt. With our scientific moralist, however, 
the case is absolutely different. I do not mean 
merely that he is ignorant of the connections be- 
tween moral phenomena ; for facts may become 
the subject of science though the laws of their 
sequence be undiscovered or even beyond the 
reach of discovery by our existing resources. 
But without the facts themselves there can be no 
science. And it is the misfortune of the scien- 
tific type of ethics we are now investigating that 
the phases of morality it binds together in its 
theory of development are, when not a part of 
human history, purely imaginary. We know 
nothing about the morals of the first species that 
ceased to be non-moral. From structural affinities 
and rudiments the naturalist may trace the 
genealogy of man and reconstruct his simian or 



28 Ethics not a Science like Biology. 

pre-simian ancestors ; but what material is there 
for determining their morals — what but the indi- 
vidual preconceptions of the inquirer? And of 
the morality of even our own race, in its pre-his- 
toric stage, we are in similar ignorance. What 
marks of virtue, e.g., do you find in the shape, or 
size, or cubic capacity of the Neanderthal skull? 
There is no fossil pre-human morality. And 
for lack of it the ideal of physical ethics remains 
unrealized. 

The outlook for the " science " of ethics grows 
less promising at every new survey. "With which- 
ever of the sciences we compare it, some reason 
emerges for excluding it from them. Its data do 
not carry it back with biology to the dawn of 
life. It is not, like mathematics, synthetic and 
demonstrative. And if it is to take rank with 
logic, it must forego every function except 
classification and observation, and be content to 
pass rather as a formal discipline than a real 
science. 

Perhaps, however, we have been over-hasty in 
rejecting physical ethics, or, rather, the physical 
method of ethics. Though in its extant form of 
an imaginary development of moral from im- 
aginary pre- moral phenomena it overleaps itself 
and, with vaulting ambition, falls to the other side, 



Methods of Ethics, 29 

it is not inconceivable that the method might be 
so applied as to produce a genuine science, but 
of narrower limits in space and time than current 
evolutionary ethics is wont to set. Such re- 
strictions are given, indeed, in the very subject- 
matter of ethics. For moral phenomena imply 
moral beings ; and since, as Darwin himself tells 
us, "a moral being is one who is capable of com- 
paring his past and future actions or motives, and 
of approving or disapproving of them," and " we 
have no reason to suppose that any of the lower 
animals have this capacity," it follows that the 
science of morals should take cognizance only of 
" man, who alone," as Darwin emphatically adds, 
" can with certainty be ranked as a moral being." 
There is, therefore, nothing to carry the scien- 
tific moralist out of the human sphere. It is 
different with the biologist. The human hand is 
constructed on the same pattern as the hand of a 
monkey, or the foot of a horse, or the wing of a 
bat ; and the human embryo is at first hardly dis- 
tinguishable from the embryo of a dog, or seal, 
or reptile ; so that any scientific explanation of 
man's bodily organism is inadequate, if not im- 
possible, without reference to the lower animals. 
But in ethics such reference seems little less than 
a vain parade. You may of course study the 



30 Its 7 heme Limited to Man. 

psychical attributes of the dog or the elephant, and 
this is a field much in need of cultivation; but 
however rich your harvest of observations, you 
will be no whit nearer the origin of human mo- 
rality so long, at least, as conscience continues the 
unique prerogative of man, the only moral being 
we know. Even if you imagine a moral sense in 
the higher brutes, your descriptive ethics, though 
acquiring thereby a comparative character, would 
bo as far as ever from that genesis of man's mo- 
rality which evolutionary moralists profess to ex- 
plain in their theories of physical ethics. Accord- 
ingly, the scientific moralist, instead of roaming 
comprehensively over the fields of animal life, 
must brood intensely at the altar-fires of the hu- 
man heart. However deep the mysteries of 
man's moral nature, no irradiating light falls 
upon them from the non-moral world without. 
The moral being is more than the child of nature ; 
he is the member of a kingdom where time and 
space are not. Yet is virtue not withholden from 
scientific survey, since its manifestations fall in 
time and constitute a part of the history of hu- 
manity. And if ethics, instead of groping through 
the void, impalpable inane of fictitious pre-human 
morality, would in good earnest describe historic 
morality in all its fixed and changing characters, 



Methods of Ethics. 3 1 

tracing the evolution of moral ideals and institu- 
tions from their earliest to their present form, 
then its scientific character, which is to-day a 
reproach, would be firmly established, and it 
could claim to be a science as unimpeachable as 
any other branch of history. Some such ideal 
doubtless floated before the minds of those 
writers who saw in ethics a comparative and evo- 
lutionary anatomy and physiology of morals ; but 
the associations of natural history led them to sub- 
stitute the whole extent and duration of organic 
life, which is essentially without moral character, 
for the narrow and brief history of mankind, in 
which alone moral phenomena are actually found. 
Here then, at last, we have an answer to the 
question, How is ethics as a science possible ? 
If it is ever to rise above the analytic procedure 
of logic, it can only be by becoming one of the 
historical sciences. Given the earliest morality 
of which we have any written record, to trace 
from it through progressive stages the morality of 
to-day : that is the problem, and the only prob- 
lem which can fall to a truly scientific ethics. 
The discovery of these historical sequences con- 
stitutes the peculiarity of the science, which, like 
every other, presupposes observation, analysis, and 
classification. Whenever a system of ethics pro- 



32 Ethics a Branch of History. 

fesses to be a science of any other type, whether 
of the physical or the mathematical, it is setting 
up its own speculations for facts, and imposing 
upon us a dogmatism for which no shibboleth 
can atone, be that shibboleth intuitional or utili- 
tarian, absolutist or relativist, pro- or anti-evolu- 
tionary. 

This conclusion cannot be other than unac- 
ceptable at a time when philosophical schools, 
differing so widely in theory, have agreed in the 
practice of producing and reading innumerable 
works on " moral science" or the " science of 
ethics " as it is now more generally designated. 
And yet the conclusion is inevitable. I dare 
not say, as Buckle used to say categorically of a 
very different proposition, what makes it so pe- 
culiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute 
it. But, assuredly, it is not easy to imagine how 
it can be disproved. Range, in fancy, over the 
whole circle of the sciences, and you will find 
there no place for ethics save as a branch of 
.human history. Whatever else has been as- 
signed it, belongs not to science, but to specula- 
tion ; and is none the less speculation because 
carried on by professed scientists. Putting aside 
the inquiry into the faculties or functions of the 
mind, which is plainly a part of psychology, think 



Methods of Ethics. 33 

but for a moment of some of the questions dis- 
cussed in current treatises on the "science of 
ethics." What is the chief end of man ? Is the 
will free or determined ? Is conscience innate or 
acquired? Is moral law absolute or relative? 
How did morality first come into existence ? Is 
there any other good than pleasure ? This is a 
sample, and but a sample, of the problems which 
moralists complacently include in what they desig- 
nate ethical science. To questions like these an- 
swers are unhesitatingly given, even by agnostics, 
who know that we cannot know anything but 
phenomena. Manifestly the age which has wit- 
nessed the divorce of science and speculation in 
physics, biology, and even psychology, has not in 
ethics succeeded in keeping them asunder. And 
ethics will never rank as a positive science until, 
following the lead of jurisprudence and ethnol- 
ogy, it exorcise the spirit of speculation, and 
enthrone the spirit of history as it is reflected in 
the cognate investigations of Maine and Ihering, 
of Tylor, Letourneau, and McLennan. 

I do not deny the possibility of a philosophy of 
morals, or even of law or of culture. On the 
contrary, I am convinced that every positive 
science — chemistry, physics, and mathematics 
equally with jurisprudence and ethics — leads up 



34 Scientific and Speculative Ethics. 

inevitably to a 7rp(orrj <f)t\o(ro<pia, towards which I 
am so far from assuming an indifference that I 
hold, with Kant, such indifference an impossi- 
bility to human nature, and those who profess it 
unconscious, instead of conscious, metaphysicians. 
But I am sure facts and science must precede theo- 
ries and philosophy. And the facts with which the 
moralist has to deal seem to me, not merely more 
complex, but infinitely more numerous and varied? 
than is generally supposed. Just as philology was 
retarded for centuries by the dogma that Hebrew 
was the parent of all human languages, so ethical 
science is now hampered by the assumption that 
its subject-matter can be found in the moral con- 
sciousness of the individual alone. For that moral 
consciousness is but the reflex of particular social 
conditions, and, like them, has had a history which 
needs to be traced. Nor is it at any stage of its 
development exactly the same as another moral 
consciousness, under other skies, at other lati- 
tudes, in different environments, and within differ- 
ent civilizations. Moral phenomena may vary as 
dialects vary, and until those varieties are observed 
and compared, and their developments followed 
out, anything like a philosophy of morals is im- 
possible. Ethics, as the comparative history of 
universal morality, is the vestibule to the temple 



Methods of Ethics. 35 

of moral philosophy. And whoso undergoes not 
purifications and offers sacrifices there must not 
profane with sacrilegious step the inner courts of 
the sanctuary. 

Here, then, we have a clear distinction between 
what we may call ethical science and moral philos- 
ophy. The one is a branch of history, the other of 
speculation. They stand in the same relation as 
the science of geometry to the philosophy of space 
and the axioms. But their development has been 
far from analogous. Geometry has been built up 
without regard to the ultimate nature of space 
and the validity of the axioms : such speculations 
proved less attractive than the theorems and prob- 
lems of the science. But as morals touch the most 
vital points of human life, man's practical inter- 
est in their origin and validity has overcome his 
theoretical interest in the history of their growth ; 
and we are presented with the striking anomaly 
of a science still unfounded from philosophic 
absorption in its first principles. It is obvious, 
however, that a philosophy without science is as 
empty as theory without fact, as unconvincing as 
reason without the voucher of sensuous experience. 

The achievements of modern science in every 
department of inquiry, and the influence of con- 
temporary positivism, could not fail to react upon 



36 Current Ethics Speculative. 

ethics. But although ethics has been taken in 
hand by men of science, its character has not, I 
conceive, become scientific. With some abate- 
ment one dogmatic system has merely been ex- 
changed for another. The old Metaphysih der 
Bitten has given place to the new jphysique des 
moeurs ; but, though only an occasional champion 
—a Martineau or a Green — comes forward to 
defend the former, it would take a microscopic 
intelligence to discern wherein it is more specu- 
lative than the latter, to which the scientific 
world seems to be giving in its adherence. The 
masters of the positive sciences have, however, 
become the spiritual leaders of our generation ; 
and coming to their own, their own receive them ; 
so that in morals their un verifiable guesses are apt 
to pass for scientific hypotheses, or even facts, and 
their refutation of opposing systems, easier than 
to damn with faint praise, needs only consist in 
characterizing them as " metaphysical." 

Such seems to me the present deplorable con- 
dition of ethics. Speculation, on the one hand, 
waning but conscious of itself, on the other, 
waxing but unconsciously taking itself for science. 
From neither movement can fruitful results be 
expected. The great desideratum, the sole con- 
dition of ethical progress, is the suspension of all 



Methods of Ethics. 37 

philosophizing until an ethical science has been 
constructed through a comprehensive study of the 
phenomena of universal morality. 

But has not the scientific coryphaeus of the 
century, it will be asked, undertaken these his- 
torical investigations and evolved from them a 
final philosophy of morals ? Darwin certainly is 
the father of evolutionary ethics ; and the first 
five chapters of his " Descent of Man " are turning 
out, as the late Professor Clifford was keen enough 
to anticipate, more pregnantly suggestive and more 
revolutionary than any other modern contribution 
to the subject of morals. Two considerations', 
however, suggest the incompleteness of Darwin's 
ethical work. In the first place, the historical 
method is in his hands less an independent in- 
strument of investigation in morals than an apt 
means of confirming a biological hypothesis. 
And in the second place, it never escaped the 
embrace of the spirit of speculative utilitarian- 
ism. With Darwin, in fact, historical ethics was 
forced into the service of a foregone conclusion 
upon the origin of species, and a foregone conclu- 
sion upon the derivation of morality. The time has 
now arrived when the history of morals should be 
followed out for its own sake and allowed to tell 
its own story. But such an investigation will not 



38 Importance of Darwinian Ethics. 

be attempted so long as scientists remain convinced 
of the finality of the ethical science and philos- 
ophy associated with the name of Darwin. 

It is, of course, no unusual thing to find the 
plastic, world-moving thought of a genius crys- 
tallizing into the barren dogma of a school 
wherein the master's name is invoked to stem 
the very march of knowledge which he himself 
set in motion. But doubt, as the case of Dar- 
win happily illustrates, is the condition of all in- 
tellectual progress. And the true heirs of Dar- 
win are not the dogmatists of the schools, but the 
open-minded, candid, fact-revering inquirers who 
w T alk in the spirit of the master. Socrates does 
not lay violent hands upon his father Parmenides, 
because he points out the difficulties in the Ele- 
atic doctrine of being and non-being. I^or does 
an investigator who ardently admires Darwin's 
scientific achievements, and sees in the man a 
very embodiment of the true scientific spirit, re- 
nounce his allegiance in criticising Darwin's 
treatment of the questions of morals. And noth- 
ing, I imagine, is to-day such a hinderance to a 
true science of ethics as the lack of a right un- 
derstanding with Darwinism. To supply this 
want is the primary aim of the following pages, 
though incidentally, it is hoped, a beginning may 



Methods of Ethics. 39 

be made with historical ethics, and an example 
furnished of its value for moral philosophy. The 
main object, however, is, assuming the truth of 
Darwinian science, to make a dispassionate exam- 
ination of its bearing upon morals, as well as to 
distinguish in Darwin's own moral theory what 
is fact or science from what is fancy or specula- 
tion. But this presupposes a preliminary survey 
of Darwinian ethics, and that of Darwinism, to 
the exposition of which we must now proceed. 



CHAPTEE II. 

EVOLUTIONISM AND DARWINISM. 

A generation has passed away since 1859, when 
Charles Darwin, then a man of fifty, published his 
epoch-making work on the " Origin of Species." 
The reception of the book by the public was an 
augury of the influence it was destined to exert. 
The first edition was exhausted almost immedi- 
ately, and a second edition was out six weeks 
after the first. This was followed by others ; and 
as the wave thus set a-going reached the Conti- 
nent, translations of the volume soon appeared 
in most of the languages of Europe. The book 
has had a wider influence, has stirred men's 
thoughts and feelings more profoundly, and ex- 
ercised their attention more arduously, and even 
painfully, than any other scientific work since 
1543, when Copernicus demonstrated, to the con- 
sternation of mankind, the revolution of the earth 
and laid the foundation of modern astronomy. 
Darwin's treatise has not only become the classic 



Evolutionism and Darzvinism. 4 1 

of contemporary science, but, touching the popular 
imagination, it has added a new word to our 
language ; and we all speak of Darwinism much 
as we speak of evolution. It is true the scientist 
reminds us the words are not synonymous, that 
evolution is much broader than Darwinism, that 
Darwinism is only a fragment of the total evolu- 
tionary doctrine. Still there is no regulating the 
use of new words, and for the mass of mankind 
the system of Darwin is identified with the the- 
ory of evolution. Nor is this astonishing. For, 
though evolution was taught long before the time 
of Darwin, and had even been conjectured of hu- 
man life, it did not come home to the hearts and 
bosoms of men till Darwin produced his massive 
and overwhelming argument to demonstrate how 
the development of all living beings from simpler 
forms had been brought about by means of the 
" survival of the fittest " in the a struggle for exist- 
ence." This made it believable that man was de- 
scended from the same ancestors as the apes. And 
people who had remained stolidly incurious re- 
garding the evolution of sun, and planets, and the 
milky way, and the rings of Saturn, and all the 
choir and furniture of heaven, were startled into 
wondering and inquisitive interest by Darwin's 
demonstration of our kinship with the apes. 



42 Darwin s Peculiar Doctrine. 

" The proper study of mankind is man ; " and Dar- 
win for the first time compelled general attention 
to the doctrine of evolution by the bearing of nat- 
ural selection on man's origin, kinship, and his- 
tory. He first made the public acquainted with 
the idea of development ; and the public has done 
him the honor of christening it Darwinism. 

Ask, now, a representative of the great public 
what he means by Darwinism or evolution, and 
you will probably be told it is the doctrine which 
teaches that man and the monkeys have the same 
forefathers ; or, should you succeed in finding a 
better-informed spokesman, you will be informed 
that Darwinism is the theory which supposes all 
the species of plants and animals to be the re- 
sult, not of special creation, but of gradual changes 
in pre-existing and simpler forms. Now, it is 
important to observe at the outset that while both 
these answers contain cardinal ideas of the theory 
of evolution, neither touches Darwin's great orig- 
inal contribution to that theory. Darwin was 
not the author or first propounder of the doctrine 
that man and the monkeys have the same ances- 
tors, nor yet of the doctrine that all the varieties 
of animal and vegetable life have been produced 
by the slowly accumulated modifications of one 
or more earlier types. It is true that Darwin ac- 



Evolutionism and Darzvinism. 43 

cepted these traditional tenets as a part of his 
system, and in that way procured for them a 
wider circulation and a more general assent than 
they had ever before obtained ; but Darwin never 
claimed, nor could he have claimed, a patent for 
the discovery of these ideas, nor did he assert 
any right of exclusive proprietorship to them. 
Darwin was not the author of the theory of de- 
velopment in any of its forms. It is his peculiar 
and indisputable merit to have discovered the 
mechanism by which (as is generally believed) 
development is actually brought about in our 
species of plants and animals. Not that there is 
evolution in the world, but how evolution is ef- 
fected within the sphere of life, is the central 
point of all Darwin's demonstrations. 

What, then, we must first of all ask, is the his- 
tory of that theory of evolution, the mechanism 
of whose processes it was reserved for Darwin to 
discover? Like most of the fundamental con- 
ceptions of our knowledge and our science, the 
essential elements of the theory are as old as 
human reflection. It did not spring suddenly 
from the brain of Darwin. As evolution itself 
teaches that nothing in the world is brand-new — 
nothing exists which did not pre-exist in another 
form — so must this be true of the theory of evo- 



44 Conception of Evolution Old. 

lution. It, too, like the hand that wrote it out, 
like the brain that gave it form, has had a his- 
tory reaching far back into the dim recesses of 
vanished and unremembered ages. Such meagre 
records as are preserved to us of historic times 
warrant our inclusion of the doctrine of evolution 
within the old declaration that " there is no new 
thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof 
it may be said, See, this is new ? It hath been 
already of old time which was before us." As 
names and dates are often very deceptive we 
must here be on our guard. For the evolutionary 
hypothesis was not begotten of any single brain ; 
it is the offspring of that ever-growing, ever- 
ripening human culture, at w T hose breasts succes- 
sive generations of thinkers are nourished with 
the same vital substance. Foretold in the specula- 
tions of theancient world, it was announced in the 
philosophy, poetry, and science of modern Europe, 
some decades before Darwin, by his spiritual 
foster-brothers of an earlier generation; though 
to Darwin undoubtedly belongs the honor of 
lifting it up to the full gaze of an astonished 
world and fixing it there as a landmark and a 
monument in the intellectual development of 
mankind. 

It requires but little attention to see that the 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 45 

problems underlying evolution are as old as 
human reflection. From the dawn of specula- 
tion the world and all that therein is has been to 
man an object of wonder and mystery, suggest- 
ing to him those undying questions on the origin 
of the cosmos, the source of life and conscious- 
ness, the course and tendency of the universe, the 
origin, nature, and destiny of man. But these 
are the problems with which our current theory 
of evolution has to wrestle. And though the 
modern evolutionist is able, owing to the enor- 
mous growth of physical science, to supply a 
fuller and more detailed treatment of the subject, 
the fundamental conceptions of his theory meet us 
in the most ancient cosmogonies. Thus the cardi- 
nal point of modern evolutionism — that nothing 
is, but everything is in a state of becoming, that 
nothing is fixed and immutable, but everything 
may be transformed into something else — you 
may read alike in the early speculations of a philo- 
sophical people, like the Greeks or Hindoos, and 
in those weird legends of our Algonquin Indians, 
which have been preserved from oblivion by the 
piety and devotion of Rand and Leland. This 
idea of metamorphosis, of change of one being 
into another, is not the only element of antique 
origin to be found in the modern theory of evo- 



\6 Early Greek Anticipations. 

lution. Equally old is the notion of the essential 
unity of existence, which is so important a constit- 
uent of our current hypothesis. When an evo- 
lutionary philosopher tells us one thing can be 
evolved from another only because all things 
are at bottom the same, he cannot be accused of 
speculative innovation, seeing that his dogma was 
a musty commonplace two thousand five hun- 
dred years ago ! Greek philosophy asserted, e.g., 
that atoms were the essence of all things, that 
atoms were the one underlying reality whence 
all things had issued and whither all things tended 
to return. But besides these two notions — that 
one thing may become another, and that all things 
are at bottom the same — Greek speculation also 
furnishes us with a crude anticipation of the bio- 
logical doctrine of the descent of man from some 
simpler organism. In the sixth century b.c. An- 
aximander struck out the idea that men were 
developed — not apes — but developed fishes, which 
had come on shore and thrown off their scales. 
And in the following century Empedoeles traced 
the origin of man through a process much akin 
to Darwin's struggle for life and survival of the 
fittest. This vigorous thinker held that, through 
the action of subterranean fire, there were thrown 
up shapeless lumps, formed of earth and water, 






Evolutionism and Darwinism. 47 

which afterwards shaped themselves into the parts 
and organs of animals and of men. Here was 
an infinite chaos of heads, hands, legs, arms, 
eyes, and other bodily members. Under the rule 
of chance they formed at first all kinds of strange 
and monstrous combinations, which of course 
proved unstable ; until, after a long series of 
unions and dissolutions, they at last, as if from 
exhaustion of all other modes, accidentally hit 
upon a happy marriage of suitable organs and 
members, and set up the surprise of animal or- 
ganisms and self-conscious men. This is surely 
a Darwin-out-Darwining theory of natural se- 
lection. But we have not yet reached the last 
element of our evolutionary hypothesis which 
was anticipated by the Greeks. For, in the 
fourth place, the general conception of system- 
atic growth, advance, or orderly progression, 
from matter to life, from the polyp to man, from 
the atom to the cosmos, was as familiar to Greek 
thought as to modern evolutionary science. The 
Greek natural philosophers held that the course 
of the world consisted in a gradual transition 
from the indeterminate to the determinate, so 
that higher and more complex forms of existence 
follow and depend on the lower and simpler 
forms. Thus the catholic genius of Aristotle 



48 Views of Plato and Aristotle. 

was unable to conceive the universe as other than 
a progression of graduated existence from inert 
matter at the base up through ascending forms 
of life till it culminated in the rational activity 
of man. If our agnostic scientists reject the 
theology of Aristotle, they will give him credit 
at least for his idea of cosmic development, of a 
world subject to evolution. And, fifthly, they 
will have to confess that we find in Plato an ex- 
plicit profession of the evolutionary faith in the 
antiquity of man. Either, says Plato, the human 
race had no beginning at all, or had a beginning 
in infinitely remote ages — at a time so far back 
that in the interval seasons have changed, ani- 
mals have been transformed, and human civiliza- 
tion has been many times acquired, lost, and re- 
acquired. 

Among the Greeks, then, we find these five 
constituent elements of the modern evolution- 
hypothesis : the belief in the immeasurable an- 
tiquity of man, the conception of a progressive 
movement in the life of nature, the notion of a 
survival of the fittest, and the twofold assump- 
tion that any thing or any animal may become 
another since all things are at bottom the same. 
Perhaps if we knew as much of the speculations 
of other ancient peoples as we know of the Greeks, 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 49 

we should find similar thoughts elsewhere. We 
need not, however, stop to conjecture what the 
ancient world believed ; for its civilization was 
submerged, in the early Christian centuries, by 
inundations of Goths, Vandals, Huns, and simi- 
lar masses of barbarism. This social cataclysm 
was stemmed by the young Christian Church, 
which, for a millennium after, remained the one 
beneficent and potent agency in European civili- 
zation. Consequently, as the best intellects were 
everywhere in the Church, theology flourished 
and science was neglected. The meagre biblical 
account of creation was interpreted in the light — 
or, rather, darkness — of those first crude impres- 
sions which our senses give us of things ; and 
it was believed that the world had not been in 
existence more than five or six thousand years, 
that the earth was the middle point of the world, 
and man the central object of creation, with the 
Church about him, hell beneath the earth, and 
heaven stretching beyond the utmost rim of the 
celestial universe, through orders of angelic hie- 
rarchies, up to the throne of God himself ! At 
the touch of Copernicus and Galileo, however, this 
whole fabric collapsed. And modern science, 
with which the age had long been in travail, was 
born. 

4 



50 Kant's Cosmic Evolution. 

It was not, however, till another century had 
passed that the notion of development found a 
place in modern science. In 1755, Immanuel 
Kant, the greatest of the German philosophers, 
attempted to trace the evolution of the universe 
from a primitive chaos to its present orderly array 
of suns and stars, planets and satellites. The world 
as it is, he said, is not the immediate product of 
the divine creation. God has created matter, and 
endowed it with forces ; and through the blind 
play of these forces the primitive chaos has been 
shaped, by a purely mechanical process, into cen- 
tral bodies with their planets, planets with their 
moons, and so on in ever-widening circles till 
the completed universe at last emerged, full of 
order, harmony, and beauty. Half a century 
later this theory of Kant's was independently 
established by Laplace, the greatest of French 
mathematicians. 

The conception of evolution thus introduced by 
Kant was not new to the countrymen of Leib- 
nitz. Like Kant's metaphysics and ethics, it was 
appropriated, developed, and extended from nat- 
ure to spirit by Schelling and Hegel, through 
whose influence it became a constituent element 
in German habits of thought. Meantime, in Eng- 
land, it was seized upon by geologists to account 






Evolutionism and Darwinism. 51 

for the features and appearance of the earth's 
crust. The astronomers asserted the earth was 
originally a cooling sphere of incandescent mat- 
ter. And we know it to-day as a solid core, 
enveloped with air and water, here tossed into 
corrugated mountains, and there hollowed into 
scarped ravines or spread out in fruitful plains 
and valleys. Between its primitive and its pres- 
ent condition there is an enormous interval, and 
the earlier geologists had filled it up with mirac- 
ulous cataclysms and volcanic eruptions. But 
Lyell now came forward with his proof that the 
history of the earth was a process of slow devel- 
opment, solely through the agency of causes still 
in operation. The colossal results were due, not 
to the magnitude of the causes, but to their cu- 
mulative effects in the course of vast geological 
ages, which we inadequately attempt to define by 
millions of years. Hold to this notion of an in- 
finite past, and the phenomena of the earth, like 
the phenomena of the universe, all find their 
place in the process of evolution. 

Evolution in the universe, evolution in the 
earth ; it now remained to discover evolution in the 
life of the plants and animals on the earth. And 
it was in this biological department that Darwin 
made his original contribution to the evolution- 



52 Later Evolutionary Science. 

ary movement, at the same time that his friend 
Lyell was carrying it into geology. "We have 
abundantly found that Darwin did not originate 
the general theory of evolution. We are now to 
see he was not the first to propound even the 
more limited doctrine of the evolution of plants 
and animals. Fifteen years before he was born, 
his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in Eng- 
land, the poet Goethe, in Germany, and Geoffrey 
Saint Hilaire, the French naturalist, came almost 
simultaneously to the conclusion that species were 
not separate creations and immutable, but de- 
scendants of pre-existing simpler forms and ca- 
pable of undergoing modifications. From that 
day to this there has been a ferment of specula- 
tion on the origin of species. Early in the cen- 
tury it took the form of an antagonism between 
creation and evolution. Are our species of plants 
and animals primeval creations, or modified de- 
scendants of simpler species ? A horse is different 
from a zebra ; a man is different from a monkey 
■ — were they created different, or is each pair de- 
scended from a common ancestor? The evolu- 
tionary view of the question was maintained 
throughout the first third of our century by the 
eminent French naturalist, Lamarck, " whose 
conclusions on the subject excited much attention." 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 53 

"He first did the eminent service," says Darwin, 
11 of arousing attention to the probability of all 
change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic, 
world being the result of law, and not of mirac- 
ulous interposition." He held that organic beings 
were modified by the action of the physical con- 
ditions of life, by the crossing of already existing 
forms, and by the effects of habit — of use or of 
disuse. It is due to constant use, e.g., in brows- 
ing on the branches of trees that the neck of the 
giraffe has grown to such an abnormal length. 

Lamarck was the true precursor of Darwin. 
And Darwin's M Origin of Species " was the cul- 
minating point of evolutionary biology. That 
work may be called the embodiment of its au- 
thor's intellectual life from his twenty-second to 
his fiftieth year. What, now, was the theory 
which Darwin struck out and elaborated in these 
twenty-eight years ? What was Darwin's original 
contribution to that hypothesis of evplution with 
which his name is now so generally associated ? 
Well, in the first place, it was not the general 
theory of development — the theory which sup- 
poses that everything, instead of being created as 
it is, has reached its present precise and deter- 
minate form only after passing through an infin- 
itude of lower stages. And, secondly, it was not 



54 Darwin s Contribution. 

the particular biological application of this gen- 
eral doctrine, seeing that Lamarck and other 
naturalists had maintained before Darwin that 
our species of plants and animals were growths, 
and not independent and immutable creations. 
But Darwin's original contribution to the evolu- 
tionary theory was & demonstration of the mech- 
anism by which the development of species had 
been effected. To take a specific example, he 
undertook to show how it happened, by what 
means it was brought about, that from one an- 
cestral species there could have descended, in the 
course of thousands on thousands of generations, 
four species so distinct as the horse, the ass, the 
quagga, and the zebra. 

In explaining how species originated, Darwin 
got most help from the study of domesticated 
animals and cultivated plants. The initial and 
even fundamental fact of his whole theory is the 
tendency of all living beings to vary ; and the 
variations, which are generally minute and in- 
definite, are especially noticeable in our cultivated 
plants and domesticated animals. Thus every 
boy knows how much rabbits in a hutch differ 
from one another in the hue of their fur, the 
length of their ears, etc.; and anybody who has 
paid the least attention to dogs, horses, cows, or 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 55 

other animals, or even to plants, will readily ad- 
mit that each individual has peculiarities which 
mark it off from its fellows. This, then, is the 
first fact to which Darwin calls attention — indi- 
viduals of the same species, descendants of the 
same parents, differ from one another by small, 
insignificant, and indefinite variations. The sec- 
ond fact is that these differences may be trans- 
mitted to offspring ; they may be inherited. And 
the third fact is that man, by attending to those 
variations which are useful or pleasing to him, 
may originate breeds so diverse as the dray- and 
the race-horse, or the greyhound and the race- 
hound, or the carrier- and the tumbler-pigeon. 
Man creates nothing ; he waits for the variations 
which nature gives; and then selecting those 
which are useful or pleasing to him, he preserves 
them, and in preserving accumulates them, 
throughout successive generations. Man's power 
of accumulative selection is, therefore, the key 
to the origin of our diverse breeds of domesti- 
cated animals and cultivated plants. And the 
influence of this power cannot well be overesti- 
mated. Speaking of what breeders had done for 
sheep, Lord Somerville observed, " It would seem 
as if they had chalked out upon a wall a form 
perfect in itself, and then had given it existence." 



56 Domestic Breeds Formed by Alan. 

Take another species, and consider the numerous 
breeds of pigeons — the carrier, the tumbler, the 
runt with its long beak, the barb with its short 
one, the pouter with its enormous crop which it 
glories in inflating, the turbit with its reversed 
breast-feathers, the trumpeter and laugher with 
their peculiar coo, the fan tail with its forty tail- 
feathers instead of fourteen. Yet these astonish- 
ingly diverse breeds are all descended from the 
wild rock-pigeon of the European coasts ; and 
Darwin, who was a great pigeon-fancier and 
member of two of the London pigeon-clubs, 
found no difficulty in explaining the origin of all 
these varieties from man's power of selecting and 
accumulating the individual peculiarities which 
nature was always presenting. Suppose, e.g., that 
some tamed rock-pigeons, ages ago, happened to 
have more than fourteen tail-feathers. A pigeon- 
fancier is struck with the peculiarity, and pre- 
serves these individuals. Their descendants may 
have sixteen tail-feathers, or perhaps more. In 
the course of countless generations, pigeons may, 
as a result of man's constant selection, be pro- 
duced with twenty or thirty tail-feathers, till at 
last the fantail appears with its full quota of 
forty. 

Have we not here some light on our question 



Evolutionism and Darzvinism. 57 

of the origin of species ? We have seen that the 
various races of our domesticated animals and 
cultivated plants have been formed by man. 
Nature presents individual differences ; man pre- 
serves those beings whose peculiar modifications 
are useful or pleasing to him ; these peculiarities 
are transmitted to offspring, and in transmission 
through successive generations are accumulated, 
till forms arise which we call varieties, but which 
in fact are scarcely distinguishable from genuine 
species. Domestic races are thus made by man 
through his power of accumulative selection. But 
the species of animals and plants in a state of 
nature cannot be thus produced by man. How, 
then, do they originate ? Is there any agency 
analogous to the selection practised by man? 

Man forms domestic races, which are " incipi- 
ent species," by selecting certain natural variations 
in organisms and accumulating them by trans- 
mission through successive generations. In the 
absence of man, could the modifications which 
are constantly appearing in organic beings be 
preserved and accumulated ? Darwin affirms 
they could on one condition — that they are bene- 
ficial or directly useful to the creature modified. 
The demonstration of that process constitutes at 
once Darwin's solution of the origin of species 



58 Selection the Means. 

and his original contribution to the hypothesis of 
evolution. It was the spark which kindled into 
life the long-prepared materials for biological 
science. The thought of natural selection, of a 
universal struggle for life and survival of the 
fittest, was the soul with which Darwin informed 
the scientific body fashioned by his predecessors. 
In that thought, and that alone, consists, as 
Haeckel says, the essentiaL service which Darwin 
rendered to modern science. 

But what in particular is the nature of this new 
formative conception ? and how did it originate 
in Darwin's mind ? The latter question Darwin 
himself enables us to answer. After he had at- 
tained, through a study of domestic productions, 
a just conception of the power of selection, it 
dawned upon him, " on reading Malthus l On 
Population, 5 that natural selection was the inevi- 
table result of the rapid increase of all organic 
beings." And he justly describes his own cardi- 
nal principle as " the doctrine of Malthus applied 
with manifold force to the whole animal and 
vegetable kingdoms." It was with man that 
Malthus, an English reactionary against the social 
optimism of the school of Rousseau, was primarily, 
if not exclusively, concerned. He saw a barrier 
set to the realization of their dream of the happi- 



Evohitionism and Darwinism. 59 

ness of human society in the constant tendency of 
population to multiply faster than the means of 
subsistence. While human beings tend to in- 
crease in a geometrical ratio, food can at best be 
increased only in an arithmetical ratio. The in- 
evitable result is starvation. And starvation is 
the ultimate check to population. But although 
the ultimate, it is not the immediate check ; since, 
in ordinary circumstances, the unrestrained in- 
crease of human beings is prevented by pruden- 
tial considerations with regard to marriage, by 
brutal and revolting practices, and by such ruth- 
less destroyers as disease, war, pestilence, and the 
whole train of human miseries. 

Such is the principle of Mai thus. It has be- 
come a constituent part of political economy, 
giving its tone, one might almost say, to the treat- 
ise of Mill. And it has become the germinant 
idea of biology, accounting, in the hands of Darwin, 
for the formation of varieties and the origin of 
species of plants and animals in a state of nature. 

Let us now endeavor to follow Darwin's account 
of the process. 

The first moment is the excessive fecundity of 
nature, which Darwin was enabled to realize from 
his observation of the teeming, self-strangling life 
of the forests of Brazil. But to take a less favor- 



60 Fecundity of Organisms. 

able case, consider the elephant, which is the slow- 
est breeder of all known animals. Yet, at the 
minimum rate of increase, a single pair would 
"after a period of from seven hundred and forty 
to seven hundred and fifty years " have " nearly 
nineteen million" living descendants. "Even 
slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five 
years, and, at this rate, in less than a thousand 
years there would literally not be standing- 
room for his progeny." Or, consider the case of 
plants. There is no plant which does not produce 
more than two seeds ; yet, merely at that rate of 
increase, an annual plant would, in the course of 
twenty years, produce a million plants. Without 
adding examples, we may now realize Darwin's 
general statement "that every organic being natu- 
rally increases at so high a rate that, if not de- 
stroyed, the earth w r ould soon be covered by the 
progeny of a single pair." Hence, as infinitely 
more individual animals and plants are produced 
than can possibly survive, nature must be the 
scene of universal competition. " There must in 
every case be a struggle for existence, either one 
individual with another of the same species, or 
with the individuals of distinct species, or with 
the physical conditions of life." Existence is an 
appalling tragedy, with the universe for its scene, 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 61 

and for time the duration of geological ages ; its 
characters are made up of that infinitude of indi- 
viduals which constitute the organic world ; but 
so full of horrors is the drama that most of the ac- 
tors are cut down at their first entrance upon the 
stage, while those who escape are doomed to a 
never-ending struggle for life, in which only the 
strongest and the best favored have any chance 
of reaching the second scene, that opens, like 
the first, with mutual conflict and all but uni- 
versal extermination. Now, in this struggle of all 
against all, and of each with the conditions of 
life, it is easy to see that the struggle will gen- 
erally be most severe between closely related or- 
ganisms, between species of the same genus, or 
individuals and varieties of the same species, ow- 
ing, of course, to the similarity of their structure, 
constitution, and habits. The fish does not com- 
pete with the bird ; and of birds, swallow com- 
petes against swallow, and robin against robin. 
So complex, however, is the web of relations 
by which all organic beings of the same country 
are bound together that helps or checks to the in- 
crease of a species frequently come from the most 
distant and unexpected sources. "Who would have 
suspected that the growth of red clover was largely 
dependent on cats ? Yet, as this flower can be f er- 



62 Struggle for Life. 

tilized only by the humble-bee, and humble-bees 
flourish only where mice do not destroy their 
combs and nests, and mice are destroyed by cats, 
we can see that without cats there would be no 
combs and nests, no bees, and therefore no fertili- 
zation of clover. 

Directly or indirectly, then, the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms are, owing to the enormous 
rate at which living beings tend to increase, the 
scene of universal competition and struggle for 
existence, in which the great majority must inev- 
itably perish. We have seen, however, that all 
living beings are subject to slight modifications ; 
and taking account of the infinite complexity of 
the relations of all organic beings to one another, 
and to their conditions of life, it would be strange 
if some of these modifications were not more ben- 
eficial than others. In that case the individuals 
that have happened to undergo this profitable va- 
riation would have an advantage over their rivals. 
They would, accordingly, be victorious in the 
struggle for life ; and transmitting their benefi- 
cial peculiarities to descendants, these would enjoy 
a similar advantage. Such favored forms would 
spread and conquer, while their rivals would 
first decline and then become utterly extinct. 
This is what Darwin means by natural selection, 



Evolutionism and Darwinism, 63 

or survival of the fittest, in the struggle for exist- 
ence. 

See, now, the result. As man forms domestic 
races by selecting and preserving through succes- 
sive generations those individuals whose peculiar 
modifications are useful or pleasing to him, so, in 
the struggle for life, individuals with modifications 
useful to themselves are preserved, while their less- 
favored rivals are killed out; and in transmitting 
to their offspring the peculiarities which enabled 
them to survive, they begin the formation of a 
distinct variety, which, in the lapse of geological 
ages, may emerge as a new species. Man forms 
species through selective breeding, the result of 
his own choice ; nature forms species from that 
selective breeding which is the necessary conse- 
quence of the extermination of rivals and sur- 
vival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. 

This, then, is Darwin's theory of the origin of 
species. Assuming that species were not special 
creations, fixed and immutable, Darwin shows 
how all the species of any one genus have been 
developed from a single stock by means of natu- 
ral selection, or survival of the fittest, in the strug- 
gle for life. The horse, the ass, the quagga, and 
the zebra are not originally distinct species, but 
descendants of a common ancestor, modified 



64 Formation of Species. 

through natural selection. And as other species 
may, in the same way, be reduced to a single 
primitive form, it is clear that the number of 
original species will be exceedingly limited. In- 
deed, some naturalists hold that all the organic 
beings which have ever lived on this earth may 
be descended from some one primordial form. 
And even the cautious Darwin maintains that all 
" animals are descended from at most only four 
or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or 
lesser number." 

In this genealogical table of all living beings 
man cannot be separated from the apes. Both 
are modified descendants of the same progenitors. 
This deduction from Darwin's theory of natural 
selection, now, is confirmed by a comparison of 
the two species. In the first place, their struct- 
ure is not only on the same fundamental plan, 
but presents a complete correspondence of parts. 
If you compare the gorilla with man, you will 
find, it is true, that its brain-case is smaller, its 
trunk larger, its lower limbs shorter, its upper 
limbs longer, in proportion, than those of man ; 
but in all these respects the other apes depart 
still more widely from the gorilla. And what- 
ever organ or system of organs be selected for 
comparison, whether the vertebral column, the 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 65 

skull, the teeth, the hand, the foot, or even the 
brain, it has been established by Huxley, after the 
most careful determination of form and weight 
and number, that in every visible character " the 
structural differences which separate man from 
the gorilla and chimpanzee are not so great as 
those which separate the gorilla from the lower 
apes." Secondly, the minute structure and com- 
position of the tissues and blood of monkeys is 
closely similar to our own. They are liable to 
our diseases, and have been known to suffer from 
catarrh, consumption, apoplexy, fever, etc. Their 
nervous system, too, is similarly affected. They 
often take to tea, coffee, tobacco, and spirituous 
liquors. They have been known to get drunk ; 
and on the following morning they have exhib- 
ited the perfectly human phenomenon of Katz- 
enjammer, with its complication of headache, 
doleful countenance, and disgust with beer or 
wine, but relish for the juice of lemons. An 
American monkey, we are told, after once getting 
drunk on brandy, would never taste it again. 
Shall we call this the simian stage of American 
teetotalism? Thirdly, man possesses in a rudi- 
mentary condition organs or parts which are 
regularly present in some of the lower animals. 

These now useless parts and organs can be ex- 
5 



66 Mans Kinship with the Apes. 

plained only on the assumption that man is de- 
scended from some lower animal in which these 
rudiments were useful. Eut in monkeys many 
of the same parts are in a rudimentary condition ; 
hence, monkeys will have a genealogy similar to 
man's. And, fourthly, embryologists have shown 
that in the early stages of its existence the young 
human being goes through the same development 
as the young ape, and in the later stage, if 
marked differences appear, the human being is 
not more unlike the dog than the ape is. 

Man, then, must be ranked in the same order 
with the apes. The whole simian stock, includ- 
ing man, has sprung from the same progenitors. 
And the structure and condition of this common 
ancestor may even now be dimly discerned by 
anyone who can interpret the human and simian 
characteristics we have just mentioned. Such an 
observer would discover that the early progeni- 
tor of man was a hairy, tailed quadruped, proba- 
bly arboreal in his habits, and a denizen of 
some warm, forest-clad land in the Old World. 
But behind this Adam even there is a pre- 
Adamite. If we look still farther back in the dim 
recesses of time, we shall see the genealogical line 
running through a long series of diversified forms 
of marsupial, of reptile, of fish, to an ultimate 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 6j 

ancestral animal — a JBsh-like creature, which 
united both sexes in itself, and in which the lungs 
existed as a float and the heart as a simple pul- 
sating vessel. Iso paradise was the birthplace of 
this first parent, but the shore of a restless sea, 
whose changes by day and by month begot in 
him that periodicity of function which, like an 
echo over eternities, to this day survives in his 
latest human descendant. 

This, then, is Darwin's new hypothesis in nat- 
ural history. I have had to limit myself to the 
merest outline. But I must add, before pass- 
ing on, that Darwin develops his theory with a 
fecundity of intellectual resources, a wealth of 
observations and experiments, a skill in the group- 
ing of evidence, and, more than all, with an ex- 
treme of caution in speculation and an extreme of 
candor in weighing the arguments of opponents, 
which no one can fail to recognize as marvellous 
in itself and even honorable to our common hu- 
manity. Hasty, however, as our sketch has been, 
it will now, I think, be clear what the essential 
moment of the Darwinian theory really is. Were 
we asked to define it, we should say, Darwinism is 
the application of the law of natural selection— 
i.e., struggle for life and survival of the fittest — 
to account for the development of life and the 



68 Darwin s Achievement. 

origin of species throughout the whole organic 
world. It is only a part of the general theory 
of evolution. For evolutionism is that conception 
of the universe which regards it as the result, 
not of an act, bat of a process, which holds that 
it is not now what it was in the beginning, but 
has become what it is through a series of slow and 
gradual changes, whereby growth, development, 
or progress has been effected, and all purely by 
the action of causes immanent in the universe. 
This evolutionism is as old as human thought, 
and it had explained before Darwin the process 
of development in the inorganic world. Further, 
it had asserted development as a law of life and 
originator of species ; but causes adequate to 
such a result it had not discovered. It was this 
lack that Darwinism supplied with natural selec- 
tion. 

It is not the province of the present investiga- 
tion to inquire into the truth of evolutionism and 
of Darwinism. Assuming them true, we have to 
ask, "What follows ? But before raising that ques- 
tion I may be allowed to observe, as a simple his- 
torical fact, that no one nowadays seems to doubt 
the validity of the general theory of evolution. 
That the genesis of the cosmos and of the earth 
which we inhabit is not explained by a single 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 69 

creative act, but implies a process extending 
over the immensity of geological ages, is ad- 
mitted by everyone at all conversant with the gen- 
eral results of modern astronomy and geology. 
And " so far as the animal world is concerned," 
we have the high authority of Professor Huxley 
for the assurance that " evolution is no longer a 
speculation, but a statement of historical fact." 
Observation has done for the natural sciences pre- 
cisely the reverse of what criticism has done for 
the Homeric poems — it has turned a number of 
separate stories into a continuous epic, an epic 
which traces the world-events from that homo- 
geneous chaos "in the beginning" to the defi- 
nite, coherent, heterogeneous cosmos of to-day. 
While, however, evolutionism is generally accept- 
ed in some form or other, theistic or naturalistic, 
rationalistic or agnostic (in itself it is absolutely 
neutral between these metaphysical theories), there 
is not the same unanimity of verdict, even in the 
scientific world, about Darwinism. There is no 
doubt, I think, that the vast majority of what Pro- 
fessor Huxley calls the "hodmen of science" ac- 
cept Darwin's theory of natural selection, both in 
itself and in Darwin's extensive application of it. 
But it is yet a significant fact that leaders, perhaps 
the leaders, of the scientific world give only a very 



jo How Regarded by Scientists. 

qualified adherence to Darwin's essential doctrine. 
Helmholtz asserts that, while natural selection may 
have been competent to produce varieties within 
the same species, and even many so-called species, 
the question of the descent of species in general, 
and man in particular, is at present determined 
rather by the preconceptions of individual in- 
vestigators than by the facts themselves. And 
Yirchow, after claiming for experts alone the 
final adjudication of the question (and this claim 
every dispassionate thinker will concede), goes on 
to observe that at the present time there is no 
actual warrant for taking the step from the theory 
of descent (which, let me say, was as fascinating 
for Kant as for Darwin) to the fact of descent, 
though, on the other hand, there is no ground for 
maintaining that it is either impossible or irra- 
tional. More important still is the testimony of 
Alfred Sussell Wallace, the joint discoverer with 
Darwin of the theory of natural selection. And 
yet it is Wallace who tells us that u natural selec- 
tion could only have endowed the savage with a 
brain a little superior to that of an ape." Lastly, 
Darwin's friend and defender, Professor Huxley, 
tempering his well-founded admiration with 
equally well-founded scepticism, reminds us in 
no uncertain tones that our " acceptance of the 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 71 

Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional so long 
as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting ; 
and so long as all the animals and plants certainly 
produced by selective breeding from a common 
stock are fertile, and their progeny are fertile with 
one another, that link w T ill be wanting. For so 
long selective breeding will not be proved to be 
competent to do all that is required of it to pro- 
duce natural species." So that "it yet remains 
to be seen," as he tersely puts it, in a later work, 
" how far natural selection suffices for the produc- 
tion of species." 

According to most eminent authorities, then, 
the case stands thus : Biology has demonstrated, 
as matter of historic fact, that life first appeared 
on our globe in plant-form, that it next emerged 
in the lower animals, and thence passing by in- 
numerable gradations through beings of increasing 
complexity of organ and function it culminated 
in man. There is, therefore, evolution in the 
organic world, as science has already traced it in 
the inorganic. But the cause of this evolutionary 
movement in the history of organisms has not as 
yet been established ; though it is probable Dar- 
win's natural selection is a part of the cause. In 
other words, we know that there has been evolu- 
tion, but we are not yet certain how it has been 



J 2 The Missing Evidence. 

brought about ; we know, as Dr. Martineau puts 
it, the when of evolution, but not the whence. 

That the missing evidence in the evolutionary 
theory of causation may yet be supplied, everyone 
who has felt the divine impulse to science will 
ardently hope, as the more enthusiastic, indeed, 
confidently predict. In fact, the belief in the ul- 
timate perfectibility, if not in the present perfec- 
tion, of the doctrine has become a part of the 
scientific fanaticism with which our age matches 
the religious fanaticism of the sixteenth century. 
And so it happens that the majority of readers 
are scarcely aware of the hitches in the Darwinian 
argument any more than they were formerly aware 
of the intellectual difficulties in the way of many 
accepted theological dogmas. For all such minds, 
now, any inquiry into the ethical significance of 
Darwinism w r ill be without weight unless the 
theory in its entirety be accepted as initial truth. 
I propose, therefore, without further ado, to as- 
sume, for argument's sake, that the Darwinian 
hypothesis has been completely established ; and 
I would, then, invite Darwinists to join me in an 
impartial attempt to interpret that hypothesis, 
and to determine its bearings upon the problems 
of morals. Whether there actually exists, as the 
late George Henry Lewes imagined, a wide-spread 



Evolutionism and Darwinism. 73 

fear and dread of science, I shall not pretend to 
determine ; but if it exists, it is certainly an an- 
achronism. For the scientist is the veritable ruler 
of the modern world. And, for my own part, I 
can understand no feeling but that of admiration 
and loyalty towards the man who, from no other 
motive than the simple love of truth, gives his 
days and nights for weary years to spelling out 
that mystic language which God has illuminated 
by the central fires of the world, traced in the 
orbits of planets, graven upon the strata of the 
earth's crust, and sent echoing round the great 
globe in the rhythmic pulse-beat of all organic life. 
Such men were Kepler, Faraday, Agassiz, and 
Darwin. Thanks to these, and such as these, we 
can to-day read a little in nature's book of infinite 
secrecy. The gradual development of all organic 
and inorganic existence they seem already to have 
completely spelled out. How that development 
was effected in the domain of life is still a mys- 
tery ; but for argument's sake, I repeat, we are 
ready to let Darwin's hypothesis of " Natural Se- 
lection" stand for the yet undeciphered hiero- 
glyphic. 



CHAPTER in. 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE DAR- 
WINIAN HYPOTHESIS. 

The function of natural selection in the origi- 
nation of species of plants and animals has, I trust, 
been sufficiently described and illustrated in the 
preceding chapter. We must now go on to in- 
quire into the philosophical significance of the 
doctrine. And, obviously, the main point can 
be no other than a precise determination of what 
it really is that natural selection explains, as well 
as of what is left unexplained by it, in the origin 
of species of organic beings. 

Scientific explanation consists in the assign- 
ment of a phenomenon to its causes. These causes 
must be known natural agencies. It may well be, 
indeed, that speculative reason is unable to stop 
at such causes, involving, as they do, an inconceiv- 
able regression in infinitum • but it is solely of 
these secondary causes that science takes account. 
And when this limitation of its province is con- 
sidered, it must be conceded that science is clearly 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 75 

in the right in refusing to recognize supernatural 
activity as a relevant explanation of natural phe- 
nomena. 

But it was a dogma of this kind which Darwin 
found in the biology of his day regarding the ori- 
gin of species. He substituted for it a scientific 
hypothesis of the development of life by means 
of purely natural causes. He did not deny the 
ultimate creative or preservative agency of God, 
with which as a biologist he was not called upon 
to deal ; nor is his theory at bottom a contradic- 
tion of the essence of that theological doctrine, 
for the two belong to totally different orders of 
interpretation. With complete neutrality towards 
such speculative matters, he asserted merelj r that 
the manifestation of life on our globe was 
through a process of evolution, of which natural 
selection was the proximate cause, be the ulti- 
mate cause what it may. Whether this hypoth- 
esis be true or not, it is at least an attempt to 
solve the scientific problem which, on the other 
hand, is simply overleaped by the transcendental 
doctrine of divine creation. It is the only kind 
of explanation that science can consider legiti- 
mate. 

The phenomenon to be accounted for — the ori- 
gin of species — is by Darwin referred to verce 



j6 Scientific Explanation. 

causce, to agencies actually known to be in opera- 
tion. The excessive fecundity of all organic be- 
ings, the limited means of subsistence, the inev- 
itable struggle for life, the advantage accruing, 
in this struggle, to some individuals in conse- 
quence of slight modifications in organ or func- 
tion, structure or habit, such as nature in liberal 
variety is perennially turning up, the preserva- 
tion of these favored forms, and the consolidation 
and accumulation, through transmission to suc- 
cessive generations, of their beneficial peculiar- 
ities until first varieties and then species are pro- 
duced — these are facts which every observer 
may verify for himself, and which, it is almost 
universally conceded, account for the origin of 
many, if not of all, organic species. And for the 
scientist who finds no species too marked for gen- 
esis through this common process the problem 
has been completely solved. 

But w T here science ends philosophy begins. 
The one is concerned with the discovery of pro- 
cesses, the other has to analyze the ultimates — 
realities or conceptions, being or thought — which 
the processes everywhere involve. While science, 
accordingly, sees no difference between the vari- 
ous links of the causal chain with which Darwin 
draws out the development of life, philosophy 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism, yy 

fixes at once upon a fundamental contrast between 
the initial variations and the subsequent means 
of their preservation. It regards the former as 
infinitely more significant than the latter. For the 
variations are the ultimate material out of which 
species are built up ; and though the manner of 
their consolidation is an important problem for 
science, philosophy is interested only in the 
what ? and whence ? of the variations themselves. 
Or, otherwise expressed, every new species being 
the sum of a series of variations, philosophy is 
concerned with the units, science with the mode 
of their addition. And this mode it is which 
Darwin has unfolded in his theory of natural selec- 
tion, or survival of the fittest. There have been 
objections to the theory, especially to the somewhat 
startling assumption that the results of man's pur- 
posive selection in breeding could be attained — 
and that, too, on a much larger scale — by the blind 
and purposeless operations of nature ; but grant- 
ing all that the hypothesis requires of us, we are 
still in presence of the fact that natural selection, 
or survival of the fittest, can accomplish nothing 
until it is supplied with material for " selection," 
until there has appeared upon the field an ante- 
cedent " fittest " — a fittest organ, function, habit, 
instinct, constitution, or entire organism. Natu- 



J 8 Philosophic Explanation. 

ral selection produces nothing ; it only culls from 
what is already in existence. The survival of the 
fittest is an eliminative, not an originative, process. 
And yet it is the explication of this apparently 
subsidiary process that constitutes Darwinism. 
The fact of variations in organic beings having 
been demonstrated from the experience of breed- 
ers, the sphinx of science was the problem of their 
accumulation into specific characters. It was not 
the business of biology to consider what the fact 
of variations implied. That falls to philosophy, 
whose function it is to examine the starting- 
points and first principles with which the various 
sciences uncritically set about their specific task. 

The survival of the fittest, I repeat, does not 
explain the arrival of the fittest. Natural selec- 
tion is a term connoting the fact that of the in- 
numerable variations occurring in organisms only 
the most beneficial are preserved, but it indicates 
nothing concerning the origin or nature of these 
variations. As in them, however, is ^Tiveloped 
all that is subsequently developed, they form the 
sole ground for philosophizing in connection with 
Darwinian science. 

Fortunately, too, Darwin and his followers 
have not left us in utter darkness with regard 
to the rise of these modifications, which, as we 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 79 

have just said, constitute the material for natural 
selection. In the earlier editions of the " Origin 
of Species " much influence was ascribed to the 
external conditions of life, which Geoffrey Saint 
Hilaire, a generation before, had declared the 
principal cause of change. But apart from the 
environment, Darwin always maintained, with 
Lamarck, that habit, or use and disuse, played a 
considerable part in the modification of the con- 
stitution and structure. Thus if, as is the case, 
the bones of the wing of the domestic duck weigh 
less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion 
to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in 
the wild duck, the change may be safely attrib- 
uted, he tells us, to the domestic duck flying 
much less and walking more than its wild par- 
ents. Lastly, there are modifications which emerge 
as concomitants or indirect effects of other modifi- 
cations. The whole organism is so conjoined and 
knitted together during its growth and develop- 
ment, that when slight variations occur and are 
accumulated in one part, other parts become modi- 
fied, too. A curious instance of this correlated 
variation, not in process, but in complete realiza- 
tion, is presented by the uniform conjunction of 
deafness with blue eyes in perfectly white cats. 
But however much be ascribed to the influence 



8o The Origin of Modifications. 

of external conditions, of habit, and of correla- 
tion, Darwin found these factors incompetent to 
produce the variations presupposed for natural 
selection in his theory of the origin of species. 
Accordingly, while they retain their place in the 
later editions of his work, they are there over- 
shadowed by a more potent cause of modification, 
which is nothing less than a force inherent in the 
organism itself — " an innate tendency to new va- 
riations " or a " spontaneous variability," as it is 
indifferently called. The environment is, I have 
said, still recognized as one of the factors of 
change ; but since it is shown that similar varie- 
ties are produced from the same species in differ- 
ent environments, and dissimilar varieties in the 
same environment, it is established that the nat- 
ure of the organism is a much more important 
factor than the nature of the external conditions 
of life. " We clearly see," says Darwin, " that 
the nature of the conditions is of subordinate im- 
portance, in comparison with the nature of the 
organism, in determining each particular form of 
variation ; perhaps of not more importance than 
the nature of the spark, by which a mass of 
combustible matter is ignited, has in determining 
the nature of the flames." And if he objects to 
Nageli's or Mivart's formulation of an innate 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 81 

tendency towards progressive and more perfect 
development, it is only because the phrase seemed 
to suggest an " internal force beyond the ten- 
dency to ordinary variability," not that he did 
not agree with them in holding to some kind of 
an " inherent tendency to vary." 

This, then, is our first determination regarding 
the variations which supply material for natural 
selection to work upon. They originate, we know 
not how, in the nature of the organism. Nor 
would the state of the case be essentially altered 
if it were demonstrated, in opposition to Darwin, 
that every organic modification was occasioned 
by some external stimulus. For the change thus 
set up in the organism in response to the foreign 
excitation w T ould obviously derive its character 
from the constitution of the organism, just as, to 
use Darwin's own example, the peculiarity of a 
flame is due to the constitution of the combustible 
materials, and not to the igniting spark. 

So much of the origin of the variations. With 
regard to their nature, it may be either definite 
or indefinite. That is to say, the offspring of 
individuals exposed to given conditions during 
several generations may be modified in a similar 
or a dissimilar manner. Indefinite variability is 
the general rule, according to Darwin, who, in 
6 



82 Their Indefinite Character. 

fact, takes account of no other in liis theory of 
the origin of species. He seems to conceive of 
the organization as absolutely plastic, in unsta- 
ble equilibrium, and only apparently at rest at 
a point radiating infinite directions for further 
movement. The variations, being altogether in- 
definite, offer themselves to natural selection for 
any line of development, but not for any partic- 
ular line. And Darwin was accordingly supposed 
to have substituted chance for design, a fortui- 
tous evolution for a purposive creation. It turns 
out, however, that his assertion of indefinite va- 
riability was premature, and that in any case it 
has no necessary connection with natural selec- 
tion, which, according to the latest statement of 
Professor Huxley, would operate equally well 
" if variability is definite, and is determined in 
certain directions rather than in others, by con- 
ditions inherent in that which varies." And the 
advance in doctrine is still more strikingly illus- 
trated when Professor Huxley goes on to say, " it 
is quite conceivable that every species tends to 
produce varieties of a limited number and kind, 
and that the effect of natural selection is to favor 
the development of some of these, while it op- 
poses the development of others along their pre- 
determined line of modification." This limita- 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 83 

tion of the number of variations and the prede- 
termination of their character are conceptions 
foreign, I believe, to Darwin's habitual mode of 
thought, but they may now be considered tenets 
of the school ; and Professor Asa Gray, adopting 
categorically the suggestion of Professor Huxley, 
declares, " The facts, so far as I can judge, do 
not support the assumption of every-sided and in- 
different variations." 

The nature and the origin of the modifica- 
tions being described, we have next to fix atten- 
tion upon the process of their accumulation into 
specific characters. It is the exhibition of this 
process that constitutes the peculiar glory of Dar- 
winian science. And to science, certainly, as the 
register of nature's operations, the whole subject 
of natural selection properly belongs. But when 
the designation for a purely natural process has, 
through the suggestions of metaphor and the use 
of capital letters, come to stand for something 
more than a process, and, from constant association 
with an extraneous metaphysics, lias acquired the 
potency of a conjurer's formula in the philoso- 
phy of life, mind, and conscience, it is high time 
to set about the perennial problem of laying the 
dust raised by dogmatic metaphysicians, who are 
all the more insidious when they disown their 



84 How Accumulated. 

vocation and come to us in the name of posi- *. 
tive science with the prestige that science gives. 
Darwinism, like every great principle when first 
discovered, intoxicated and unbalanced its dev- 
otees ; with license unrestrained, it has been ap- 
plied to fundamental problems of the natural and 
the spiritual world. But the ultimate mysteries of 
existence forever baffle, as they ever fascinate, the 
scientific understanding of man, and an age of confi- 
dent construction is always followed by an aveng- 
ing age of destructive criticism ; so that the high- 
towering, wide-extending edifice under w T hich but 
yesterday intellectual mankind reposed in peace is 
seen to-morrow as a conventional structure, whose 
former magnitude and splendor arose solely from 
an optical illusion distorting the perspective and 
true relations of things. It is with such specula- 
tions as with the pandemonic councillors : 

u They but now who seem'd 
In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, 
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room 
Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race 
Beyond the Indian mount, or farey elves." 

In the march of mind, if the discovery of new 
theories is indispensable, equally so is the reduc- 
tion of the monstrous shapes which they too soon 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 85 

assume to normal proportions conformable to 
reality. And pending the morrow of the Dar- 
winian and post-Darwinian speculations, we may 
to-day examine what natural selection is and 
what it is not, what it can do and what it can- 
not do. 

To maintain that Darwin, who has taught 
us all we know about the subject, gives an incor- 
rect account of natural selection would of course 
be paradoxical. Nor, in the absence of new light 
from scientific discoveries, is anyone likely to 
hazard such a judgment. Nevertheless, it will 
be found that whoever is resolute to see clearly 
the fact which Darwin means to indicate by the 
term " natural selection " must look beneath the 
phraseology in which it is described, else the es- 
sence of the matter will be missed amid the 
distracting associations of highly figurative lan- 
guage. 

Not, of course, that metaphors are unintelligible, 
or even undesirable. Only the recollection of the 
warring creeds that have sprung from biblical 
imagery, and of the opposing systems of philos- 
ophy that have turned on the comparison of the 
mind to a waxen tablet, suggests the necessity of 
looking away from a metaphorical expression like 
natural selection to the actual fact which it was 



86 Metaphorical Explanation. 

intended to denote. Now, that fact, in utter 
nakedness, is nothing more than the survival, in 
the struggle for life, of an individual that has 
somehow undergone modifications useful to it 
under the actual conditions of existence. Or, in 
Darwin's own words, "This preservation of fa- 
vorable individual differences and variations, and 
the destruction of those which are injurious, I 
have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of 
the Fittest." The process, therefore, does not 
touch the origin of the variations, or even the 
accumulation of them. Natural selection pro- 
duces nothing, either at the beginning or in the 
progress of the development ; it means only that 
when the variations have somehow appeared the 
most advantageous are preserved, and that when 
these favored forms have been somehow propa- 
gated, and thereby somehow consolidated, the most 
favored again survive in the struggle. Nature 
originates the modifications, nature propagates 
them, nature accumulates them through propaga- 
gation ; but how all this is done is a mystery on 
which science throws no light, and the personifi- 
cation of nature serves only to disguise our real 
ignorance. On the other hand, we can under- 
stand from the well-known fact of the increase 
of life beyond the means of subsistence that, 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 87 

given the creations, the transmissions, the accu- 
mulations, the worst favored must perish and 
only the fittest survive ; and this fact it is — this 
single ray of light athwart a path of darkness 
unpenetrated — that Darwin designates natural 
selection. 

!Nb w, the personification of nature is quite legit- 
imate, and often unavoidable. But when a mere 
event of nature, like the one we have just de- 
scribed, comes to be invested with a title so sug- 
gestive of volitional attributes as " Natural Selec- 
tion " is, the imagination cannot fail to run riot 
with the understanding, and the mind is apt to 
become the slave of what Bacon calls the idola 
fori. It would indeed be in itself a thankless 
task to point out the warping influence of met- 
aphorical language on the mind of a great in- 
vestigator like Darwin, but when his lapses 
(which may do no harm in science) are made the 
grounds of a metaphysical and ethical philoso- 
phy, the task, however ungrateful, must be under- 
taken. 

The term natural selection is borrowed by 
analogy from that purposive selection practised 
by man in the rearing of domesticated animals 
and cultivated plants. We have already seen that 
breeders form varieties that pass for " incipient 



88 What Man does in Selection. 

species." This result is due to the accumulation 
in one direction, during many generations, of 
slight differences, differences that may be wholly 
inappreciable to the uneducated eye and touch. 
" The key," says Darwin, " is man's power of 
accumulative selection ; nature gives successive 
variations ; man adds them up in certain direc- 
tions useful to him. " Now, this mode of language 
(of which I have hitherto availed myself) is not 
capable of misinterpretation in relation to man ; 
for everybody knows it is only by metaphor that 
man can be said to have the power of accumulat- 
ing variations or adding them up. It is very 
manifest that man can do nothing towards the re- 
sult except leave the varieties that please him fiee 
to breed together. As it is nature that gives the 
modifications, so it is nature that consolidates 
them ; man's power is limited to selecting from 
the materials given by nature that on which he 
wishes her further to operate. But that simple 
intervention does not explain the accumulation 
any more than the origination of variations ; and, 
for the rest, we have to confess that u the laws 
governing inheritance are for the most part un- 
known." The breeder's conscious selection, then, 
is not the cause, but at most the negative condi- 
tion, of the origin of domestic races. 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 89 

Now, in organic beings in a state of nature the 
struggle for life eifects what man's purposive 
selection effects for domesticated animals ; by re- 
moving other forms it leaves only those with cer- 
tain peculiar modifications free to breed together. 
It is true that in the one case these modifications 
are such as are pleasing or useful to man ; in the 
other they are such as are serviceable to the indi- 
vidual in its competition with rivals. "Man selects 
only for his own good ; nature only for that of the 
being which she tends." But the main point is 
that, just as domestic varieties arise from the se- 
lective breeding practised by man, natural varie- 
ties, which are " incipient species," arise from 
that selective breeding due to the killing out of 
competing, but less-favored, forms in the strug- 
gle for existence. And this natural selection, 
Darwin holds, is as much superior to human se- 
lection as the works of nature are to art. " As 
man," he tells us in a striking passage, " can pro- 
duce a great result with his domestic animals and 
plants by adding up in any given direction indi- 
vidual differences, so could natural selection, but 
far more easily, from having incomparably longer 
time for action." 

It has been objected that this attribution of 
superior potency to natural selection, in compari- 



90 Human and Natural Selection. 

son with the purposive selection of man, involves 
the conception of nature as an intelligent, active 
being. Nature seems to do so much, iUis urged, 
only because you have personified her ; use un- 
metaphorical language, and you will not make it 
credible that blind natural processes can ever at- 
tain the ends realized by human design. But 
this dogmatism cannot be established. For it 
is certainly conceivable that that selective breed- 
ing by which man works all his results might be 
brought about without the intervention of man. 
All that is required is that organic beings which 
have undergone some modification shall be al- 
lowed to propagate it, say, to breed together ; and 
this w r ould result as inevitably from the extermi- 
nation of all competing forms as from the exclu- 
sion of them practised by man. But extermina- 
tion does take place when variations occur in any 
individual which give it an advantage over its 
rivals in the struggle for life ; and since varia- 
tions useful to man do actually occur in organic 
beings, it would be a most extraordinary fact if 
none occurred useful to the beings themselves, 
especially w T hen we consider the vast possibili- 
ties for such useful variations contained in the in- 
finitely complex relations of all organic beings to 
one another and to their environment. Assum- 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 91 

ing, then, that such advantageous modifications 
somehow arise, the beings thus characterized will 
have the* best chance of being preserved; and 
these serviceable peculiarities will be propagated 
and, in successive generations, consolidated until 
there emerge at last varieties, as strongly, or more 
strongly marked than our domestic races. But 
this preservation, or survival of the fittest, is what 
Darwin calls natural selection. And it must 
now be evident that we have the best grounds for 
comparing its function in the development of 
species with man's function in the formation of 
domestic races. 

Not the likening of nature's work to man's, 
but the assignment to both natural and human 
selection of results which they are incompetent to 
produce, is the real valid objection to Darwin's 
presentation of his theory. We have already 
seen that man can no more accumulate variations 
than he can produce them ; accumulation is 
simply a continuous production. And yet, while 
Darwin concedes to Hooker and Asa Gray that 
man "can neither originate varieties nor prevent 
their occurrence," it is added — and that, too, in 
passing from human to natural selection — that 
" he can only preserve and accumulate such as do 
occur." Only accumulate ! And then, of course, 



92 Limits to Both. 

it is assumed that natural selection accumulates, 
too. " It may metaphorically be said that natu- 
ral selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, 
throughout the world, the slightest variations ; 
rejecting those that are bad, preserving and add- 
ing tip all that are good." And since natural 
selection is the name o£ an event that follows 
from physical causes, the reader gets the impres- 
sion that the origin of species has at last been 
referred to a system of purely natural causation. 
But the true state of the case is very different. 
No cause has been discovered for the origin of 
those variations which, through inheritance, are 
accumulated into specific characters ; and the 
theist who formerly believed in a supernatural 
cause may hold to it still, if he only substitute 
gradual for sudden creation. Do you say w r e 
need not postulate a transcendent cause ? Possi- 
bly not ; but there is nothing in Darwinism, in 
the theory of natural selection, to take the func- 
tion assigned to that supernatural power. If 
you refer the origination and accumulation of 
variations to nature, it is not the nature known 
to science, nature as a complex of phenomena 
governed by physical laws, but the poet's 
vision : 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 93 

''Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 



But this conception of nature, however true, 
is foreign to that system of efficient causes with 
which alone scientific explanation is concerned. 
If the scientist, in poetic exaltation, feels with 
Pope that " God and nature only are the same," 
or with Goethe that " nature is the living garment 
of God," he may speak of the variations out of 
which specific characters are built up as having 
natural causes, but he then uses the word " natu- 
ral " much in the same sense as ordinary people 
attach to " supernatural." But the naturalist 
who recognizes the limits of science will have to 
confess that variations come in organisms we 
know not whence, and are accumulated we know 
not I10W (though we name the processes varia- 
bility and inheritance), and that natural selection 
is only a designation for an event as simple as 
this — that beings with the most serviceable va- 
riations survive in the struggle for existence. 
Natural selection is not a power, scarcely even a 



94 The Natural and the Supernatural. 

process, but the result of a process — namely, of 
that sifting of forms effected through the all-test- 
ing combat for life. 

If this analysis of the fundamental conceptions 
of the Darwinian theory be correct, much less is 
really explained by that theory than its advocates 
have been in the habit of supposing. In spite 
of its prolific application to so many fields of in- 
quiry, one may still question whether in its na- 
tive province of biology the account given of the 
origin of species is not ultimately as supernatural 
as the dogma which it displaced. It was rightly 
urged against the latter that creation was not a 
scientific conception, that explanation consisted in 
correlating a phenomenon with other phenomena 
and assigning it a place in the tissue of our ex- 
perience, and therefore that the reference of 
species to a Creator was a mode of accounting for 
them with which science could not be content. 
But does the Darwinian theory enable us to rest 
in purely natural causation ? It tells us that 
species are the strongly marked varieties that sur- 
vive in the struggle for life, and that these va- 
rieties are formed by the consolidation of modi- 
fications that spontaneously arise in organisms. 
Here everything is assumed with the primitive 
organisms and their innate tendency to vary. 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 95 

Has not the mystery that shrouded the origin of 
species been removed simply by the introduc- 
tion of a new mystery — the wonder of an organ- 
ism so constituted that it throws off progressive 
modifications as materials for new species ? That 
science may ultimately show such variability to 
be a characteristic of organisms I do not as- 
sert or deny. My only contention is that that 
aspect of the problem of the origin of species 
which led men to refer them to a hyperphys- 
ical agency would not thereby be removed ; 
it would still reappear in the question, Whence 
those germinal organisms with their wonderful 
capabilities of differentiating into species? And 
to this question there is no satisfactory answer 
within the province of natural or physical causa- 
tion. So that ultimately it comes to this — the 
gradual development of species is one mode of 
conceiving the action of supernatural causality, 
the sudden formation of them is another. Dar- 
winism is an assertion that the former mode has 
actually been followed, not a denial of the super- 
natural ground which both processes presuppose. 
If the " Origin of Species " opens with the thesis 
that species are not independent and immutable 
creations, but variable descendants of common 
ancestral forms, it closes with the credo that it 



g6 Darwin s View of Creation. 

was "bv the Creator" that life with all its 
potencies was " originally breathed " into these 
ultimate types. Between this closing and that 
opening declaration stands the principle of natu- 
ral selection, which implies that, of all the varie- 
ties produced by the spontaneous evolutions of the 
descendants of those divinely created types, only 
the fittest or most favored survive. But even 
this sifting process has, ultimately regarded, a 
supernatural ground. It depends upon the exist- 
ence of germinal organisms, their growth with 
reproduction, inheritance, variability, and capa- 
city for increase beyond the means of subsist- 
ence — all of which must ultimately be attributed 
to " the Creator," who, according to Darwin, 
breathed " life with its several jpowers " into the 
primitive forms. 

To evolutionary science as thus unfolded by 
Darwin, or to evolutionary science pure and sim- 
ple without any such theistic reference, it is not 
competent to philosophy to offer any objection. 
Biology is clearly within its own province when 
it follows the history of organisms and delineates 
the processes or steps by which life has been " 
evolved. To this scientific investigation Darwin- 
ism makes a twofold contribution. It established, 
from actual experiments with animals under do- 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 97 

mestication, the modifiability of organisms, and 
thus grounded the presumption that species had 
been gradually formed. And, in the second 
place, under the guidance of Malthusianism it 
showed that the world is inhabited by its present 
denizens, and not by others, in consequence of the 
superiority of their modifications over those of 
their rivals in the general struggle for existence. 
This is the essential content of Darwinism. And 
it is manifestly consistent with any philosophy, 
empirical or rational, spiritualistic or material- 
istic, theistic or atheistic. 

Nevertheless, I think every reader of the " Ori- 
gin of Species " would maintain that it seems to 
explain something more than the natural processes 
just indicated, and that, further, it is so far from 
indifferent to philosophy that it draws much of its 
inspiration from a definite speculative system — 
a system, too, essentially opposed to that theism 
which the author occasionally appropriates. And 
there can be no doubt about the fact that most of 
the evolutionists have identified the new doctrine 
with a philosophy of mechanism and fortuity. 
By pure physical causation they hold that every- 
thing has been produced from a primeval nebula, 
or gas-cloud. It was in the beginning, and it has 
evolved life, intelligence, self-consciousness, all 
7 



98 Darwin s Mechanical Philosophy. 

reason in man, and the reflex of reason in the 
order of the universe. Thus no case is left for 
any hyperphysical agency, much less a creative, 
designing intelligence. 

But neither Darwinism nor evolutionism in 
general really necessitates, or even warrants, such 
a speculative inference. For if everything has 
been evolved from that impalpable nebula, either 
it was originally more than a nebula or it has been 
added to, in the course of its development, from 
a source beyond itself. An effect is simply its 
cause translated ; and nothing can be developed 
into actuality which was not enveloped potentially 
in the germ. If a primitive ether has turned 
into the cosmos with all that inhabit it, this evo- 
lution was possible only by the constant addition 
of increments which, though singly so inappreci- 
able as to pass for nothing, are in their aggregate 
so infinite that they constitute everything but 
ether. Power adequate to the result there must 
have been ; and it makes no difference whether 
it be " concentrated on a moment or distributed 
through incalculable ages." And it surely is, as 
Dr. Martineau has so happily observed, " a mean 
device for philosophers thus to crib causation by 
hair's-breadths, to put it out at compound inter- 
est through all time, and then disown the debt." 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 99 

This jugglery with causality, as though in time 
everything could be got out of almost nothing, is 
the besetting^sin of Darwinists. In Darwin him- 
self it takes the form of a dissolution of design 
into chance. In spite of his own admission that 
variations are determined by the nature of the 
organism, and that the ancestral organisms were 
divinely created and stocked with all the poten- 
cies that subsequently unfold themselves, the 
whole tone of the " Origin of Species " implies 
that organic nature has been blindly shaped by 
the mechanical operation of physical agencies, that 
instincts, functions, organs, and constitutions are 
but special instances of order that survived after 
the collapse of innumerable instances of disorder, 
which the reckless gambling of natural forces has 
been continuously producing since the first dawn 
of life upon our earth. The normal develop- 
ment seems a special case among a thousand. 
Instead of design, there is only a happy hit amid 
countless failures. Or, as Lange, rendering Dar- 
win, graphically illustrates the point : You would 
not see evidence of purpose, much less of higher 
wisdom or transcendent cleverness, in the conduct 
of a man who, to kill a hare, fired a million pis- 
tols in all directions over a vast meadow ; or 
who, to enter a locked room, bought ten thousand 



ioo Teleology in Darwinism. 

random keys and made trial of tliem all ; or who, 
to have a house, built a city and turned the su- 
perfluous houses over to the mercy of wind and 
weather. Thus the conception of design, which 
Aristotle required for the understanding of all 
nature, and which Kant could not dispense with 
in reflecting upon organisms, is declared at last, by 
the Darwinist, useless in science and unwarranted 
in philosophy. And the famous argument from 
final causes, which Paley illustrated from the 
adaptations of a watch, seems to collapse at the 
touch of Darwinism. " Suppose," says an emi- 
nent interpreter of that theory, " that anyone had 
been able to show that the watch had not been 
made directly by any person, but that it was the 
result of the modification of another watch which 
kept time but poorly, and that this, again, had 
proceeded from a structure which could hardly be 
called a watch at all, seeing that it had no figures 
on the dial and the hands were rudimentary, and 
that, going back and back in time, we come at 
last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable 
rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that 
it had been possible to show that all these changes 
had resulted from a tendency in the structure to 
vary indefinitely, and, secondly, from something 
in the surrounding world which helped all vari- 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 101 

ations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper 
and checked all those in other directions — then it 
is obvious that the force of Paley's argument 
would be gone." 

Does, then, the doctrine of descent and Dar- 
winism give the death-blow to teleology ? This 
is a question of vital importance for metaphysics 
and ethics. And it is not too much to say that 
the essential philosophical significance of Dar- 
win's work lies in its extra-scientific attempt to 
explain the adaptations in plants and animals as 
the blind outcome of purely mechanical causa- 
tion. Full of admiration for those exquisite 
adaptations of one part of the organism to an- 
other part, and of one organic being to another 
being, as well as of all organic beings to the phys- 
ical conditions of life, Darwin, after studying 
them with marvellous insight and patience, pro- 
nounces them all results of " nature's power of 
selection," of the struggle for life and survival of 
the fittest, among the innumerable combinations 
that have happened to arise. 

Now, before inquiring into the warrant with 
which fortuity is here substituted for design, two 
preliminary remarks suggest themselves. The 
first is that the doctrine of fortuitous combina- 
tions is not the outcome of modern evolutionary 



102 Evolutionism formerly Teleological. 

science, but the undemonstrated postulate of 
every merely mechanical philosophy. It is as 
old, therefore, as materialism ; and the Greek 
atomists expounded it as skilfully as the mod- 
ern English biologists, who, in fact, as we have 
already seen, were in this respect clearly antici- 
pated by Empedocles. Matter first, atoms first, 
blind, groping mechanism first : that is the alter- 
native which the history of speculation has al- 
ways offered to the philosophy that holds intelli- 
gence to be the jprius and nature but a means 
for the realization of divine ideas. If Darwin- 
ian science tends to assimilate the former, it is, 
I hope to show, equally compatible with the lat- 
ter. At most you can only claim that it stands 
Janus-faced between avdy/cr) and Z/0O9, indecisive 
whether in the beginning was rvyr) 0l% in the be- 
ginning was the X0709. 

The second remark is that the doctrine of 
evolution, previously to the form it has recently 
assumed at the hands of the empirical philoso- 
phers of England, was not, as Janet has observed, 
usually opposed to the teleological, but to the me- 
chanical, conception of the world. It was a theory 
of development from within, and in direct con- 
trast to every theory of agglomeration from with- 
out. Leibnitz is the father of modern evolution- 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 103 

ism, the foundations of which were laid in his 
law of continuity, his theory of insensible percep- 
tions, his principle of the infinitely little, and his 
profound insight into the truth that " the present 
is big with the future." And yet the evolution- 
ism of Leibnitz implies final causes, and is char- 
acterized by its antagonism to the geometrical 
mechanism of Descartes and Spinoza. Schelling 
and Hegel were evolutionists, but as remote from 
the mechanism of the French school of their day 
and the English school of ours as they were near 
to the hylozoism of the ancient Greek cosmologists. 

Evolutionism, then, is not mechanism. Nor, as 
I think it can be shown, does the Darwinian doc- 
trine of descent with modifications necessarily 
imply fortuity. Perhaps nothing in the " Origin 
of Species " has lent more color to that view than 
the account given of the formation of the eye 
and of the origin of the peculiar instinct of the 
cuckoo. And w r e may be sure that if not here, 
then nowhere in Darwin, does the fortuitous 
really play the role of a veritable artist, a deus 
absconditus, a creator of order and design. 

It is well known that the European cuckoo lays 
her eggs in other birds' nests. The American 
cuckoo, however, makes her own nest. But in 
rare instances she has been known to follow the 



104 Instinct of the Cuckoo. 

example of the European cuckoo. From this 
fact Darwin undertakes to derive the origin of 
the unique instinct of the latter by means of nat- 
ural selection. " Suppose," he says, " that the 
ancient progenitor of our European cuckoo had 
the habit of the American cuckoo, and that she 
occasionally laid an egg in another bird's nest. 
If the old bird profited by this occasional hab- 
it, through being enabled to migrate earlier or 
through any other cause ; or if the young were 
made more vigorous by advantage being taken of 
the mistaken instinct of another species than 
when reared by their own mother, encumbered, 
as she could hardly fail to be, by having eggs 
and young of different ages at the same time — 
then the old birds or the fostered young would 
gain an advantage. And analogy would lead 113 
to believe that the young thus reared would be 
apt to follow by inheritance the occasional and 
aberrant habit of their mother, and in their turn 
would be apt to lay their eggs in other birds' 
nests, and thus be more successful in rearing their 
young. By a continued process of this nature I 
believe that the strange instinct of our cuckoo 
has been generated." 

This hypothesis raises many interesting ques- 
tions for the scientist, but we are only concerned 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 105 

with the fortuity which it seems to imply. We 
need not question that modifications of instincts, 
as of organs, may be advantageous ; or that, having 
occurred, they will tend to perpetuate themselves 
on an arena where the race is to the swift and the 
battle to the strong. And we may even concede 
as possible Lamarck's identification of instinct 
with hereditary habit, and Darwin's derivation 
of such habit from the repetition of serviceable 
actions insured through natural selection. But 
on two points more light is indispensable. In the 
first place, do such variations of instinct as the 
hypothesis supposes actually occur ? Experiment 
has shown that the habits of bees may be changed ; 
but has it shown that this flexibility is inconsist- 
ent with the doctrine of fixed instincts? To 
regard the gradations of instinct as so many 
stages in the modification of it is to take for 
granted the very question at issue. Then, in the 
second place, if the variability is granted, by what 
right is it made fortuitous ? When Darwin tells 
us that instincts have been acquired from habits 
and actions " which at first appeared from what 
we must in our ignorance call an accident," his 
language is unhappy and, indeed, unwarranted, 
for he is only giving expression to the doctrine 
with which our study of variations has made us 



106 Not Fortuitous in Origin. 

familiar — the doctrine of "spontaneous variations 
of instinct ; that is, of variations produced by the 
same unknown causes which produce slight devi- 
ations of bodily structure." But these causes, as 
he has already told us, are innate to the organ- 
ism ; they are grounded in the very constitution of 
the being that varies. Were they not, they could 
not be inherited. An action purely accidental — 
ungrounded, that is, in the nature of the being 
that performs it — would not, on the doctrine of 
chances, even be repeated by that individual, 
much less transmitted to its descendants. What 
is there to transmit in such a fortuitous perform- 
ance ? By the very definition of it, it stands un- 
related to everything else, and exhausts itself in 
the doing. If the strange habit of the European 
cuckoo was formed in the way indicated by Dar- 
win, it is only because a predisposition to that 
mode of action lay dormant in the constitution. 
" When species vary," says the eminent botanist 
Naudin, whom Darwin frequently quotes, " they 
do so in virtue of an intrinsic and innate prop- 
erty." Mere chance variations could never get 
repeated and perpetuated. And this, indeed, is 
implied in a sentence with which Darwin con- 
firms the report of the occasional aberrant habit 
of the American cuckoo. " I could also," he says, 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 107 

"give several instances of various birds which 
have been known occasionally to lay their eggs 
in other birds' nests." If the cuckoo's deviation 
were as fortuitous as these, if it had no predeter- 
mining and abiding ground in the constitution of 
the cuckoo, how came it alone to develop into an 
instinct, when all the advantages accruing in this 
case were presumably operative in the others, 
too? This marriage with fortuity really ham- 
pers the single-eyed achievement of Darwin. Di- 
vorcing his science therefrom, he elsewhere ad- 
mirably describes his position in these words : 
" If it can be shown that instincts do vary ever 
so little, then I can see no difficulty in Natural 
Selection preserving and continually accumulat- 
ing variations of instinct to any extent that was 
profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the 
most complex and wonderful instincts have origi- 
nated." Here, as always, everything is assumed 
with the variations. And their character can 
onlj* be determined by direct observation and by 
inference from what they effect ; and neither of 
these methods justifies us in calling them fortui- 
tous. 

When we pass from instinct to organ, we are 
still in the presence of analogous facts. The 
question is, How was the eye, with all its inimi- 



io8 Evolution of the Eye. 

table contrivances and marvellous adjustments, 
formed? The lowest animals, and probably our 
remotest ancestors, had no eyes, or any other sense 
than touch. We can imagine that the first stage in 
the development was a slightly heightened sense 
of feeling at some spot in the organism. If it 
gave the animal an advantage over others, either 
in procuring food or in defending himself, or in 
any other way, it would enable him to vanquish 
his rivals and perpetuate his advantageous modi- 
fications ; and if the variability in that direction 
continued, animals possessing it would in surviv- 
ing accumulate it, until, after the lapse of mill- 
ions of years, the sensitivity might have solidi- 
fied into something like the pigment-cells that 
constitute the lowest organs of vision now in ex- 
istence. It is at this point Darwin takes up the 
problem. The apparatus of an optic nerve, 
coated with pigment and invested by transparent 
membrane, is only one step onward ; and when 
we reflect on the wide, diversified, and graduated 
range of ocular structure in the lower animals, 
" the difficulty," according to Darwin, " ceases 
to be very great in believing " that natural selec- 
tion may have converted this simple apparatus 
into an eye as perfect as man's or the eagle's, with 
all its wonderful arrangements for admitting 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 109 

light, changing the focus, and correcting spheri- 
cal and chromatic aberration. If the eye varies, 
what are all these different gradations but so many 
stages in the history of its variability — forms 
that have been preserved by natural selection ? 
" The difficulty of believing that a perfect and 
complex eye could be formed by natural selec- 
tion, though insuperable by our imagination, 
should not be considered as subversive of the 
theory," nor will it so be considered by any sci- 
entist who feels it " indispensable that the reason 
should conquer the imagination." 

But if reason is to " conquer the imagination," 
it can only be by clearly apprehending the facts 
which imagination distorts. And when the im- 
agery of the preceding description is translated 
into reality, the account of the formation of the 
eye looks reasonable enough, though of course it 
is not proof against an irrational interpretation. 
What perplexes us at first is the creative func- 
tion assigned to natural selection. The eye is 
"formed by natural selection." And repeatedly 
in the same chapter natural selection is said to 
"produce structures." Now, we have not hither- 
to thought of natural selection as an originative 
power, and we are not prepared to admit that it 
could have formed the eye. And, indeed, it is 



no Not Explained by Darwin. 

only metaphorically that anything of the kind 
can be attributed to it. Natural selection, it 
must be reiterated, is only a phrase for the sur- 
vival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. 
But the survival of an eye at any stage of de- 
velopment is a very different thing from the for- 
mation of an eye. Natural selection, as Darwin 
elsewhere says, u can do nothing until favorable 
individual differences or variations occur." As it 
was only figuratively that we found it designated 
an " accumulative " agency, much bolder is the 
figure that invests it w r ith " productive " powers. 
Literally, it means nothing but the survival of the 
fittest ; and reason and imagination alike concur 
that the " fittest" must have preceded the survival. 
Eyes, therefore, are not formed by the survival 
of some of them, but merely culled and sifted. 
Natural selection does not issue the creative 
w r ord, Let there be sight ! Its is the humbler 
function of sitting in judgment on all forms that 
do emerge, dooming some to death and promot- 
ing their executioners to higher life. To find 
out, now, if there is any trace of design in the 
matter, you must turn your gaze from the bench 
of judgment and scrutinize the beings that aw T ait 
its sentence. And doing so, must you not assert 
that the same ends which are realized in the 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism, n I 

highest forms of organism and of organ were 
already contemplated and prefigured in their 
lower antecedents, and the gap between the two 
filled up by progressive modifications that strive 
restlessly toward their predetermined goal ? And 
in Darwin's account of the formation of the eye, 
when metaphor has been translated into fact, I 
can find warrant for nothing more than this: 
That the eyes of animals have been improved 
through beneficial modifications, originating we 
know not how or whence, and that, in the strug- 
gle for life, the least advantageous eyes have been 
eliminated. Natural selection explains how any 
particular eye came to be perpetuated, once it had 
arrived upon the scene, but it is dumb regarding 
the formation of that or any other eye. 

Although Darwin's account of the evolution of 
the eye contains nothing more than I have stated, 
there was, I think, in Darwin's mind an arriere- 
pensee due to speculative preconceptions. In 
accordance with the philosophy of fortuity, he 
seemed to regard the variations between which 
natural selection had to decide as altogether in- 
definite in their character, running out in every 
direction, and as little adapted, for example, to 
the formation of an eye as to the formation of a 
6tone. The infinite modifications of that tingling 



H2 Variations not Indefinite. 

sensitivity at some spot of the skin of our sight- 
less ancestor might have developed into any- 
thing else than an eye ; and it is solely owing to 
the fact that other combinations, innumerable 
and heterogeneous, could not hit upon a stable 
equilibrium in relation to the environment that 
an eye happened to be set up at all. In this 
view, natural selection is only a learned name for 
chance. And so interpreting it, Lange, as we have 
seen, ridicules teleology, and the design-argument 
of Paley is declared by Huxley forever obsolete. 

But we now know there is no scientific w r arrant 
for this philosophy of chance. 'No organism 
varies indefinitely. " A whale," says Professor 
Huxley, " does not tend to vary in the direction 
of producing feathers, nor a bird in the direction 
of producing whalebone." And, as we have al- 
ready seen, other authorities join in the denial 
that variations are every-sided and indifferent. 
Further, the same scientists assure us that the 
" importance of natural selection will not be im- 
paired " by this view of variations. But if so, 
natural selection is manifestly not wedded to 
chance, and not incompatible with design. Kay, 
it seems * to presuppose design; since develop- 
ment takes place along certain predetermined 
lines of modification, and natural selection only 



The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 113 

weeds out the inferior competing forms. The 
skin-spot that develops into an eye, and the re- 
volving barrel that could develop into Paley's 
watch, both presuppose a tendency to definite 
variations ; and this being confirmed by the 
latest evolutionary science, as we have already 
seen, everything is conceded that the teleologist 
demands. Natural selection as little implies for- 
tuity as it excludes reason. Its alliance with 
an irrational and mechanical philosophy is due 
merely to a historical accident. The scientists 
who first ardently embraced the doctrine, and 
burned with missionary zeal in promoting it, 
happened for the most part to favor, or to seem 
to favor, a materialistic metaphysics. And this, 
in conjunction with the undertone of kindred 
speculation we have already noticed in Darwin 
himself, led inevitably to a coalescence of the new 
science with the old philosophy. The union was 
allowed to pass unchallenged by the first assail- 
ants, who were more bent upon disproving natu- 
ral selection than keen in distinguishing between 
scientific hypotheses and metaphysical specula- 
tions ; and it is still all but universally believed 
that the biology of Darwin is inseparable from 
those mechanical and materialistic schemes of the 
universe into which it has been fitted by the ingeni- 
8 



114 Fortuity not Involved. 

ous labors of evolutionary teachers in Europe and 
America. That there is no necessary connection, 
however, between the two, that Darwinian science 
is independent of this philosophy of mechanism 
and fortuity, has, I think, been convincingly estab- 
lished in the course of the present examination. 

The determination of the general philosophical 
significance of Darwinism is a considerable step 
towards the solution of our ethical problem, for 
which, indeed, it was an indispensable precondi- 
tion. Every system of ethics is affiliated to a 
metaphysics, expressed or understood ; and every 
system of metaphysics carries with it a definite 
ethics. The moral philosophy of Kant could not 
be grafted upon the mental philosophy of Hume ; 
and the "First Principles" of Spencer would 
never blossom into the " Sermons on Human 
Nature." On the other hand, the mechanical 
conception of the world has always engendered a 
utilitarian theory of morals. But if, as we have 
shown, Darwinian biology does not imply the 
philosophy of Democritus, it cannot, at least 
through that channel, conduct to the ethics of 
Epicurus. Are morals, then, in any way affected 
by the doctrine of natural selection ? 

To this question an answer is attempted in the 
following pages. 



CHAPTER IV. 

DARWINISM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALS. 

It is important to fix accurately in mind what 
the subject of the present chapter is. With Dar- 
win's own ethical views and speculations we have 
now nothing to do, though the exposition and ex- 
amination of them (both in themselves and in re- 
lation to his natural science) must form the topic 
of a later chapter. Just at present, however, our 
inquiry is of a more general character. We want 
to know whether, the Darwinian doctrine of evo- 
lution being assumed, it entails any particular 
theory of morals. Or, since natural selection is 
the essence of the scientific achievement of Dar- 
win, we have simply to ask, Does natural selec- 
tion involve or indicate a definite type of ethics, 
so that acceptance of the one logically necessi- 
tates acceptance of the other ? This question, it 
is obvious, is not identical with an inquiry into 
Darwin's own moral system, which, though de- 
pendent upon some philosophical principle, may 



1 1 6 Natural Selection in Morals. 

be absolutely disconnected with the hypotheses of 
biology. Leaving Darwin the moralist, therefore, 
wholly aside, we would fain settle whether Dar- 
win the naturalist, in establishing the function 
of natural selection, thereby predetermined ethics 
to a particular form or invested its phenomena 
with a new cast of thought. And this point can 
be resolved only by ignoring the uncritical assump- 
tions of the school and undertaking afresh an in- 
dependent consideration of the facts and analysis 
of the notions which the Darwinian theory in- 
volves. 

That theory, as already expounded, consists 
essentially of tw r o moments — the struggle for life 
and the survival of the fittest. The former con- 
nects it historically and logically with Malthusi- 
anism, and may be considered as an applica- 
tion of the famous doctrine of population to the 
whole organic world. That is to say, the strug- 
gle for life follows inevitably from the enor- 
mous increase of living beings beyond the means 
of subsistence, as first pointed out in the case of 
man by Malthus. This debt to the national po- 
litical economy Darwin has openly acknowledged. 
But it has not been observed that the other mo- 
ment of his theory — the issue of the struggle — 
was conditioned by a conception borrowed from 



Darwinism in Ethics. Wj 

the national ethics. He remembered distinctly, 
as he wrote Haeckel, how on reading Malthus's 
" Essay on Population " the thought of a uni- 
versal struggle for existence first flashed upon his 
mind. But he could not remember, so early, so 
gradual, so subtly pervasive is the entrance of 
ethical ideas, when he had become inoculated with 
the national utilitarianism. Yet it can scarcely 
be doubted that it was from this source he ex- 
tracted the notion of utility as determinator of 
the issue of the combat for existence. No one 
uninfluenced by the ethics of the school of Hume 
and Bentham would have ventured to interpret 
the evolution of life as a continuous realization of 
utilities. And yet the survival of the fittest, by 
which, according to Darwin, development is ef- 
fected, just means the preservation of the most 
useful modifications of structure or habit. " Any 
being, if it vary, however slightly, in any man- 
ner profitable to itself" says Darwin, "will have 
a better chance of surviving, and thus be natu- 
rally selected." Or, in other words, before the 
operation of natural selection there must be a 
utility of some kind on which it acts. What is 
useful is preserved, what is harmful is destroyed. 
"Nature cares nothing for appearances, except 
in so far as they may be useful to any being." 



1 1 8 The Moment of Utility. 

Thus, as you dig down to the roots of existence, 
you find it draws its vital sap from utility. 
" Natural selection acts solely by and for the good 
of each." It may " produce structures " for the 
direct injury of other species, but never for 
their exclusive advantage. "With certain excep- 
tions that can be explained, the structure of 
every living creature as well as every detail of that 
structure " either now is, or was formerly, of some 
direct or indirect use to its possessor." Similarly, 
the instinct of each species is useful for that 
species, and has never been produced for the ex- 
clusive benefit of another species. Could these 
propositions be refuted, " it would," says Darwin, 
"annihilate my theory," for structures and in- 
stincts could not in that case be the product of 
natural selection. The survival of the fittest 
implies an antecedent utility — a modification ad- 
vantageous to the individual or, it may be, to the 
community of which it is a member, but never 
directly and exclusively to others beyond this 
pale. Natural selection rests upon a biological 
utilitarianism, which may be egoistic or commu- 
nistic, but which cannot be universalistic. 

Let us now apply this doctrine to man, with the 
object of discovering its bearing upon morals. 
We have, then, to admit that the human species 



Darwinism hi Ethics. 119 

lias originated and developed to its present stage 
through the preservation and accumulation of a 
number of useful modifications which, whether 
of individual or social benefit, gave our semi- 
human, semi-brutal ancestors an advantage over 
other animals in the struggle for life. Of these 
modifications, one of the most obvious is an erect 
attitude. This peculiarity, which the orang, the 
gorilla, and the gibbon seem now on the way to 
acquiring, has manifest advantages. It enabled 
simian man, not only to hurl missiles at his 
enemies without forfeiting the power of simul- 
taneous locomotion, but also to break and dress 
stones for definite purposes, thus beginning the 
career of that tool-using animal whose skill and 
ingenuity have changed the face of his physical 
environment. 

But this career, even in its commencement, 
would have been impossible without the emer- 
gence of a still more important factor in the de- 
velopment. Mind is infinitely more useful than 
mere bodily structure ; and it is not necessary to 
deny intelligence to the lower animals when we 
assert that the human mind is the most colossal 
and revolutionary of all the modifications any 
species has undergone. Such an "enormous ad- 
vantage would be preserved and perpetuated by 



120 The Utility of Mind. 

natural selection. For it enables man to do at 
once what nature takes ages to accomplish for the 
other animals ; it enables him to adapt himself 
to his environment without change in bodily 
structure and organization. Imagine a group of 
carnivorous animals suddenly exposed to a severer 
climate and obliged to capture more powerful 
prey ; only those with the warmest natural cloth- 
ing and strongest claws and teeth could manage 
to survive \ and as the battle with their evil star 
grew fiercer, the group, if not altogether exter- 
minated, must languish through the long course 
of aeons until their modifying organs and struct- 
ures had become completely adapted to the new 
requirements through the play of natural selec- 
tion. But the mental powers of man render him, 
in similar circumstances, independent of nature. 
He makes thicker clothing, and he fashions 
sharper weapons or constructs more cunning pit- 
falls. Simple as these performances seem, how 
infinitely advantageous they must have been in 
the struggle for life. When the intelligence 
which made them possible first appeared upon 
the scene, it effected " a revolution which [to 
quote the language of Mr. Alfred Russell Wal- 
lace] in all the previous ages of the earth's history 
had no parallel, for a being had arisen who was 



Darwi?iis7n in Ethics. 121 

no longer necessarily subject to change with the 
changing universe." 

Simultaneous with this revolution was another, 
scarcely less significant, due to the appearance 
and operation of the moral sentiments. The 
moral being lives for others as well as for him- 
self. But the lower animals are at best grega- 
rious, not social ; they lead a life of individual 
isolation and self-dependence. Each is alone, in 
the battle for life, exposed to the whole force of 
the combat. The sick and the feeble fall victims 
to beasts of prey or die of starvation. There is 
no division of labor to. relieve the one from di- 
rectly procuring its own food, no mutual assist- 
ance to succor the other till health and vigor are 
restored. Accordingly, any group of animals en- 
dowed with the least tincture of sociality and 
sympathy would, through the internal union and 
strength which these qualities evoke, have a de- 
cided advantage over other groups not thus en- 
dowed. A tribe animated by these instincts con- 
tains in itself a principle of survival of scarcely 
less efficacy than the mental faculties themselves. 
If these check the action of natural selection on 
the body, and transfer it to the sphere of intelli- 
gence, the social and sympathetic feelings screen 
the individual and oppose to the play of natural 



122 The Utility of Virtue. 

selection the solid framework of a united and 
strengthened society. But sympathy and social- 
ity imply fidelity, trustworthiness, truthfulness, 
obedience, and the like. And as these are useful 
in the struggle for life — being, in fact, means of 
social survival — not less useful are the other virt- 
ues which form the complex tissue of our moral- 
ity. Hence it follows that the moral sentiments, 
as motors tending to the preservation of the tribe, 
must, like the mental faculties, be self-preserving 
and self -accumulating under the utilitarian sway 
of natural selection. 

This view of the development of the simian 
quadruped into the moral person by means of 
natural selection seems to confirm the general 
impression that utilitarian ethics is the necessary 
implicate of Darwinian biology. We began by 
remarking that the biological theory borrowed 
the notion of utility from empirical morals ; but 
we must now confess the loan has been so success- 
fully invested that there is some ground for be- 
lieving the proceeds suffice, not only to wipe out 
the obligation, but even to make ethics debtor 
to biology. In demonstrating the evolution of 
plants and animals, organs and functions, in- 
stincts and intelligence and conscience, through 
the preservation and accumulation of modifica- 



Darwinism in Ethics. 123 

tions useful for survival in the struggle for life, 
biology has led up to an ethical theory which 
places the governing principle of human conduct 
in utility ; since, on its showing, utility has gen- 
erated that conduct as well as the life and the 
species in which it is manifested. In the war of 
nature, nothing seems inviolate except what is 
useful. The stone which the intuitional moral- 
ists despised has become the bead of the corner. 
In the evolutiono-utilitarian theory of morals, 
the process which nature has blindly followed in 
the development of life comes to a consciousness 
of itself, and is recognized as the norm of human 
conduct. " The ideal goal to the natural evolution 
of conduct is," according to Mr. Spencer, " the 
ideal standard of conduct ethically considered." 
Moral life is held to consist in harmonious 
adaptation to that social tissue whose production 
through natural selection was a prime condi- 
tion of the origin of a species of moral beings. 
Moral rules are regarded as the expression of 
those social adaptations which, on the whole, and 
after infinite gropings, proved most serviceable in 
the preservation of groups of human animals in 
the struggle for existence. They are the picked- 
up clothes which warmed and protected a naked 
social body and enabled it to vanquish all its 



1 24 Biological Ethics. 

rivals. Little wonder if, after the conflict, they 
have become a fetich to the victors — to all but 
the few who have tracked their fossil history ! 

Thus, then, this philosophy of human conduct 
has been merged in the wider philosophy of life. 
But the new utilitarianism wears an aspect some- 
what unlike the old. They hold, indeed, the same 
fundamental position in regard to opposing the- 
ories ; but as between themselves there is an 
obvious contrast. For, though the note of util- 
ity is as clear in the " Origin of Species " as in 
the " Principles of Morals and Legislation," there 
it means power-giving, here pleasure-giving ; so 
that, far from running into each other, Darwinism 
and Benthamism might take their places respec- 
tively under those opposing categories of activity 
and pleasure into which Schleiermacher resolved 
every difference of ethical systems. 

Of course, if it could be shown that what 
brings pleasure is identical with what gives power 
to survive — what is serviceable in the struggle 
for life — the case would be changed, and the last 
residuum of the old utilitarianism would have 
been assimilated by the new. But for this iden- 
tification Darwinian biology supplies no material. 
And though it has been speculatively attempted 
in Mr. Herbert Spencer's elaboration of Pro- 



Darwinism in Ethics. 125 

fessor Bain's suggestion that pleasure is accom- 
panied by an increase of some or all of the vital 
functions, his arguments are not so much deduc- 
tions from evolutionary science as postulates of 
a foregone psychological and ethical hedonism. 
Even, however, where hedonism is theoretically 
held to, it is no longer the real vital moment of 
evolutiono-utilitarianism. Instead of the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number, you have an- 
other standard ; and morality, as with Mr. Leslie 
Stephen, is defined as " the means of social vital- 
ity," " the conditions of social welfare," " the sum 
of the preservative instincts of a society." In 
the last phase of its development, as in the ear- 
lier, utilitarianism retains the conception of mo- 
rality as something relative, a means to an end 
beyond itself, and as a product of physical or 
psychological compulsion rather than the self- 
imposed law of a free moral agent. It has for- 
feited none of the essential attributes of a system 
of utility. But, in spite of the protests of its 
leading advocates, it is casting the slough of 
pleasure, which seemed a vital part of its earlier 
life. It still holds that the moral is identical 
with the useful, though when you ask, " Useful 
for what ? " the answer is no longer " For pleas- 
ure," but "For preservation" — i.e., for social 



126 Utility and Pleasure. 

vitality, for the well-being of the community. Of 
those pleasures and pains in which Mill fonnd 
the sole motive of conduct, as well as the crite- 
rion and the sanction of morality, Darwin knows 
nothing ; but, these apart, the essence of utilita- 
rianism and the essence of Darwinism, the prin- 
ciple of utility and the principle of natural se- 
lection, have such strong elective affinities that 
to effect their combination nothing was required 
but to bring them together. Their union estab- 
lishes the high- water mark of contemporary util- 
itarianism. 

The transformation has given scientific com- 
pleteness to utilitarianism. In the hands of Ben- 
tham, even, the phenomena of morals were held 
apart from all other phenomena, but through the 
common notion of natural selection they have 
been colligated with the facts of biology ; and 
from the enlarged horizon a gain is expected sim- 
ilar to that which came to the sciences of heat, 
light, and electricity when they were recognized 
as merely different applications of the one gen- 
eral theory of motion. And already, it is main- 
tained, obscurities of the system on its lower 
plane are dissipated in the light of its higher alti- 
tude. Nor is this effected by the incorporation 
of elements foreign to the primitive doctrine, such 



Darwinism in Ethics. 127 

as may be seen, for example, in that peculiarly 
noble and attractive exposition which the pre- 
evolutionary utilitarianism received from its last 
great exponent. In John Stuart Mill's presenta- 
tion of it the ethics of utility transcends itself, 
and the hedonism of Bentham lias to be supple- 
mented by the moral law or categorical impera- 
tive of Kant, which appears under the form of a 
" sense of dignity," a reverence for the humanity 
in one's person, an abiding consciousness of an 
ideal and attainable worth which forbids dallying 
with lower ends however strong the attraction of 
their pleasures. But it is not by such an amalga- 
mation of opposing conceptions that the evolu- 
tiono-utilitarian commends his theory. He holds 
that utility alone, under the action of natural se- 
lection, takes on the appearance of morality, and 
he pledges himself to derive from this lowly 
source all those lofty attributes with which men 
have invested the moral law and glorified it as 
the oracle of God. Thus evolutionary ethics 
claims the field, not merely as a deduction from 
biology, but as a complete scientific explanation 
of the phenomena of morals. This aspect of it 
we have now to consider. 

The moral law is popularly regarded as simple, 
unanalyzable, or ultimate. When it is said that 



1 28 Explains Moral Law. 

justice is right, that benevolence is a duty, that 
stealing or lying is wrong, we do not attempt to 
demonstrate these propositions by means of others, 
but directly and immediately assent to them as 
carrying their own self-evidence. It is instinc- 
tively felt that no reason can be given for them, 
any more than for the axioms of geometry. And 
the unsophisticated sense of the plain man is 
shocked by the suggestion that moral precepts 
stand or fall with their conduciveness to pleasure, 
and still more by the suggestion that virtue, 
which he takes to be the end of life, " is natu- 
rally and originally no part of the end," but merely 
a means to something else — to pleasure as final 
goal. And it was very difficult for Mill and his 
predecessors to explain how in theory men had 
been duped into accepting ethical precepts solely 
on their own credentials, and how in practice they 
had been hoodwinked into realizing them disin- 
terestedly, for their own sake, and without the 
slightest reference to ulterior consequences. But 
the example of the miser did valiant service in 
their psychology ; and it was argued that, if mon- 
ey, originally only a means to what it purchases, 
could through association of ideas come to be de- 
sired for itself, and that, too, with the utmost inten- 
sity, virtue might undergo a similar transforma- 



Darwinism in Ethics. 129 

tion, and through conduciveness to an end event- 
ually become identified with the end. Nor is the 
musty example of the miser yet obsolete, as 
readers of Mr. Spencer will remember. It is, 
however, reinforced with new arguments in the 
ethics of the evolutionists. They do not require 
the plain man to believe that the tissue of his 
ethical sentiments has been woven in his own 
lifetime. They show him how the warp and 
woof were spun in the brains of animals scarcely 
yet emerged as men, and then, following the 
movements of the shuttle in the roaring loom of 
time, they delineate the formation of a moral 
texture in our race — a texture inherited by every 
individual when once it has been acquired by the 
species. And how precisely is it acquired ? By the 
help of natural selection. The early societies 
that did not happen to hit upon the practice of 
justice, benevolence, etc., could not possibly hold 
together against groups observing these relations ; 
and then the constant danger of extermination 
impressed the survivors with the indispensable- 
ness of the fundamental virtues, which flamed 
ever before them, as it were, in characters of blood. 
What we are familiar with seems simple, what 
we have always done we do again ; and who can 

wonder, therefore, that our primitive ancestors, 
9 



130 InnalenesSy Simplicity, Etc. 

slaves of imitation and of habit, should have 
deemed moral precepts self-evident and the prac- 
tice of them an end in itself ? 

Equally with the simplicity and ultimateness 
of our moral conceptions, the evolutionist ex- 
plains their innateness. Agreeing with the in- 
tuitionist that these notions are part of the orig- 
inal furniture of every mind that comes into the 
world, the evolutiono-utilitarian holds them to be 
ultimately derived from experience ; and if he be 
a hedonist, like Mr. Spencer, he will add, from 
experience of pleasurable or painful consequences, 
though this experience is by him relegated to 
the past history of mankind. u Moral intui- 
tions are the results of accumulated experiences of 
utility." Just as the emotion you feel in visiting 
the home of your youth seems unique and inexplic- 
able, yet is manifestly due to a vague recollection 
of joys formerly associated with the objects that 
surround you, so, it has been ingeniously suggested 
by M. Fouillee, the sentiments which accompany 
the performance of virtuous acts are the perfume 
of an earthy soil — a kind of recollection or in- 
distinct echo, not only of our own pleasures, but 
of the joys of the entire race. And it is this rever- 
beration over the ages of a utility for the race that 
we take for an innate tendency to disinterestedness. 



Darwinism in Ethics. 131 

A similar account is given of the immutability 
and universality of moral conceptions. Morality 
being the indispensable condition of social exist- 
ence, it is coextensive with humanity. The 
primal virtues shine in every tribe and nation, 
for without them no section of the human family 
could have found its way through the struggle for 
existence. And as amid many smaller variations 
the general conditions of social life are every- 
where the same, moral laws could not fail to be, 
if not eternal and immutable in the absolute 
sense of Cudworth, yet as unchanging and endur- 
ing as the human species and the universe it in- 
habits. The fundamental agreement in men's 
moral notions is thus explained without any as- 
sumption of supranatural revelation or d priori 
intuition. 

Moral obligation presents a greater difficulty ; 
and evolutionary moralists of the school we are 
now considering have had to fall back upon the 
answer of the ordinary utilitarians. They ascribe 
the sense of obligation to the effects of the leral 
and social sanctions with which certain kinds of 
conduct are visited. Moral motives being at first 
inseparable from political and social motives, they 
have been permeated with that consciousness of 
subordination to authority which naturally arises 



132 Account of Obligation. 

out of the relation of subject to ruler and of in- 
dividual to tribe. The coerciveness which now 
forms so important a constituent in our conscious- 
ness of duty is a survival of the constraint with 
which primitive man was forced by external 
agencies into certain lines of conduct and deterred 
from others. And hence it follows that, as 
morality is differentiated more completely from 
the legal, political, and social institutions in which 
it originated, the feeling of obligation generated 
by them will gradually fade away. Thus the 
evolutiono-utilitarian account of obligation dis- 
covers it a transitional feature in the process of 
human " moralization," and this essentially is all 
that it adds to the theory of Mill and Bain. 

This newest theory of morals, here too briefly 
outlined, embraces in its range the entire province 
of moral conceptions and sentiments. But from 
what has been said the general character of the 
system will be readily discerned. It is simple, 
intelligible, and even plausible. That it should 
have proved fascinating to all, and irresistible to 
many, of the generation that has so long listened 
to it with an ardor brooking little distraction from 
other theories, cannot be a matter of surprise to 
anyone who has duly considered the facts with 
yhioh the theory is associated. Borrowed, as 



Darwinism in Ethics. 133 

they are, either from observation or from well- 
established sciences, and fitted ingeniously into 
current evolutionary ethics, they seem to be an 
organic part of the structure ; and the question of 
otherwise explaining them is not likely to be 
raised. Conversely, the full implication of the 
principles upon which they are here grafted has 
been left unexplored. And thus, while the new 
ethical philosophy has been widely accepted, a 
determination of the bases on which it really 
rests still remains to be made. This want we 
must now attempt to supply. 

In the first place, then, evolutionary ethics, as 
hitherto presented, takes for granted the deriv- 
ative character of morality. I say " as hitherto 
presented," because I hope to show in the sequel 
that there is nothing in the notion of develop- 
ment when applied to morals which necessitates, 
or which even warrants, the assumption. But our 
exponents of evolutionism happen to have been 
trained in the school of Epicurus, Hume, and 
Bentham, and it is not, on the whole, very sur- 
prising they should have carried the old leaven 
into the new teaching. What is surprising is the 
assumption, so coolly made, that the theory of 
evolution in some way vouches for the utilitarian- 
ism our moralists associate with it. As though a 



134 First Assumption. 

follower of Plato or Kant, for example, could not 
be a Darwinist in science ! Is it forgotten that, 
even if goodness be an end in itself — the sole end 
worth living for — it still remains true that hon- 
esty is the best policy, that honest acts are the 
most advantageous acts, and that they will ac- 
cordingly be preserved through natural selection 
in the struggle for existence ? All that natural 
selection requires is that something shall be use- 
ful ; what else it may he, what other predicates it 
may have, wherein its essence consists, natural 
selection knows not and recks not. Be virtue a 
proximate end or an ultimate end, natural selec- 
tion tells us it will be preserved and perpetuated 
if it is useful; and it tells us no more. It is, 
accordingly, a gratuitous assumption which our 
exponents of evolutionary ethics make, when 
they decline to allow more than a merely relative 
value to morality. And as their position derives 
no support from evolutionary science, so is it 
exposed to all the objections which moralists, 
voicing the universal consciousness of mankind, 
have brought against it, from the time when 
Aristotle asserted that virtue has no extrinsic 
end (rod tcaXov eveica) to the time when Kant pro- 
claimed the absolute worth of a good-will. 

In the second place, the current expositors of 



Darwinism in Ethics. 135 

evolutionary ethics having made the radical as- 
sumption that moral laws are not categorical im- 
peratives which command unconditionally, but 
hypothetical imperatives which prescribe means 
to the attainment of some end, they cannot escape 
the problem of determining wherein consists that 
ultimate end, conduciveness to which alone gives 
morality its worth and obligation. Nor, in gen- 
eral, has the school been dismayed by the mag- 
nitude or the obscurity of this problem. Possibly 
it has not fully realized that the question is noth- 
ing less than an inquiry into the highest good 
for man or the supreme end of human endeavor. 
Be that as it may, one cannot but be interested 
to find that, in spite of the distrust of reason 
generated by modern theories of knowledge, our 
evolutionary thinkers dare to face the problem 
which, in undisturbed consciousness of reason's 
might, ancient philosophers put in the foreground 
of their ethics. Even in an age of agnosticism 
thoughtful men come round to the sphinx-riddle, 
What am I here for ? what is the end of life ? 
The question may not, it is true, take precisely 
this form in the mouth of a modern evolutionary 
moralist, but that, after all, is substantially what 
he is bent on discovering and what he must dis- 
cover — mmt, if his thesis is to be made good that 



136 Second Asstimption. 

morality is only a means to something else. And 
there is no logical reason why he should not 
appropriate the Aristotelian solution that man's 
highest good consists in the most perfect rational 
activity, that his supreme end or function is to 
inform life with reason and make his entire being 
the embodiment of reason. But, as a matter of 
fact, most typical evolutionary moralists have 
selected a very different ethical end — pleasure. 
They have maintained with Mr. Spencer that 
"the good is universally the pleasurable," and 
that conduct is made good or bad solely by its 
" pleasure-giving and pain-giving effects." 

Still the evolutionary moralist, even of the de- 
rivative school, is not necessarily committed to this 
solution of the problem. He may doubt that the 
supreme end of life is to get and to give the 
greatest amount of pleasure. And appropriating 
the language of that Rabelaisian description of 
Carlyle's, on which Mr. Spencer has poured forth 
eloquent objurgation, our doubter may question 
whether the universe is merely "an immeasur- 
able swine's trough," and whether "moral evil 
is unattainability of pig's-wash and moral good 
attainability of ditto." For certainly the hedon- 
ist cannot, in the absence of antecedent obliga- 
tions which this theory excludes, but deem his 



Darwinism in Ethics. 137 

own pleasure the highest good ; and whether ac- 
cepting or not the psychology of the school 
which teaches that nothing but one's own pleas- 
ure can be the object of desire, he will acquiesce 
in the ethical dictum of Bentham, that " to at- 
tain the greatest portion of happiness for himself 
is the object of every rational being." But as 
soon as this opposition between his own pleas- 
ures and the pleasures of others is brought dis- 
tinctly into consciousness, and the former recog- 
nized as the end, the impossibility of constructing 
an ethic on this basis is manifest. There is no 
way across the chasm that yawns between " each 
for himself " and " each for others." And if 
man be merely a pleasure-seeking animal, you 
but mock him when you enjoin him to promote 
the happiness of others. Accordingly, a sincere 
and logical utilitarian who felt with Mill, that 
the spirit of his ethics w r as that of the golden 
rule of Jesus of Nazareth, would drop altogether 
the notion of pleasure, w T hich has hitherto filled 
the system with inconsistencies, and allow the 
ethical principle, thus freed from the accidental 
setting of a psychological hedonism, to proclaim 
itself as the greatest good of the greatest num- 
ber, or, better still, as the well-being of society. 
Whatever be the content of that well-being (and 



138 The End Pleasure or Good? 

there is much in it besides pleasure), it, and not 
happiness either of self or others, is the end 
which utilitarianism pure and simple, the utili- 
tarianism of Mill divorced from his more than 
dubious psychology, might set up as the ultimate 
end for every moral agent. And this, in fact, is 
the supreme principle of the ethics of Darwin, 
though he directs attention rather to the gene- 
sis of moral rules than to the reason for our ob- 
serving them. And thougli Mr. Spencer is too 
strongly influenced by the national ethics to fore- 
go the final reduction of morality to pleasure — 
and even the agent's own pleasure — he yet main- 
tains that those acts are good which conduce 
to the welfare of self, of offspring, and of soci- 
ety. The same end is recognized by Mr. Leslie 
Stephen in his explanation of moral rules as 
means of social preservation ; yet Mr. Stephen 
has not been so unfaithful to what he calls his 
own " school " — Bentham, Mill, etc. — as to sep- 
arate its psychology of self-seeking from its 
ethics of self-sacrifice. 

When this divorce does take place, how r ever — 
and already it is heralded in Darwin — there will 
be no longer in this respect a fundamental oppo- 
sition between evolutionary ethics and common- 
sense morals. Attempts to patch up a truce, on 



Darwinism in Ethics. 139 

the assumption that pleasures might through 
heredity be transformed into duties, have utterly 
failed. But the simple recognition of the wel- 
fare of society as an ultimate end is not to go 
outside of morality to find a reason for it, against 
which the intuitionist has always protested. It is 
to take one virtue, already recognized by the in- 
tuitionist, for the whole of virtue. And to that 
extent the two schools are in essential agreement. 
A difference, however, appears when you inquire 
if there are not virtues which the general formula 
of promoting the well-being of others does not 
embrace. Common-sense seems to say there are 
other duties as original, as self-evident, and as 
obligatory, as benevolence. And it does look ra- 
ther incredible that every man should be an end 
to others and not to himself. We do not easily 
rid ourselves of the conviction that goodness con- 
sists rather in the realization of a certain type of 
character in ourselves than in the performance of 
any external actions, though of course conduct 
promotive of the welfare of others would be one 
necessary outcome of the character thus indi- 
cated. 

I come now to a third characteristic assump- 
tion of current evolutionary ethics — the fortuitous 
origin of morality through a process purely me- 



140 Third Assumption. 

chanical. This must, I think, be regarded as the 
fundamental tenet of the school ; but in England, 
at least, it seems to have been taught with all the 
reserve of an esoteric mystery. The accredited 
expounders of the subject have in their exoteric 
writings enveloped this point in such a wrapping 
of extraneous discussions that even a master 
in ethics like Professor Sidgwick has hazarded 
the declaration that evolution, however con- 
ceived, can make no difference at all in our 
ethical theories. But, with all deference to so 
eminent an authority, I hold that if this mechan- 
ical conception of moral evolution be conceded, 
the question of an ethical end — of what we ought 
to aim at — becomes unmeaning, since there cannot, 
in a literal sense, be any ends or aims for a being 
conceived as a mere mechanism, even though its 
random acts have through natural selection been 
solidified into habits, and habits, on the super- 
vention of consciousness, been reflected as rules. 
And this interpretation of evolution would be as 
fatal to practice as to theory. An individual 
who really accepted it must regard moral respon- 
sibility as illusory, as nothing but an echo of 
the modes of conduct which enabled the human 
species to overcome what was untoward to its 
progress or what threatened its extinction. For 



Darwinism in Ethics. 141 

"him the entire preceptive part of morality must 
seem a baseless imposition. And in the courage- 
ous language of M. Guyau he could recognize 
nothing but ane ?norale sans obligation ni sanc- 
tion. No longer avTovofio? man must perforce 
be avofjios. Had this point been brought out as 
clearly by the English as by the French evolu- 
tionists, they would have seen that their own prin- 
ciples required them to dismiss the incongruous 
problem of establishing the validity of moral 
rules, even if they still persisted in speculating on 
the origin of them. It is worse than idle for 
mechanical evolutionists to talk of the reason or 
end or ground of morality. 

That morality has had a mechanical origin is, 
I have said, the fundamental assumption of cur- 
rent evolutionary ethics. The ancestors of man 
had no moral fibre in their constitution, but 
through long-inherited experiences of the conse- 
quences of conduct man has been rendered "or- 
ganically moral." Just as intelligence, in general, 
according to the same theory, has been generated 
in unintelligent beings through the accumulation 
of modifications arising from intercourse between 
the organism and its environment, so the moral 
faculty, in particular, is the result of all those ex- 
periences whereby mutually repellent individual 



142 Mechanical Origin of Morals. 

animals were fused together into society and en- 
abled to perpetuate a victorious existence. The 
evolutionist conceives life as the continuous ad- 
justment of inner relations to outer relations ; so 
that, even before the rise of sentiency, the acts of 
living beings must have been adapted to their en- 
vironment, and intelligence, when it did emerge, 
could be nothing but the consciousness of rela- 
tions already blindly established, and the function 
of conscience could only be to recognize the utility 
of what promoted life. The evolution of man— 
the self-conscious and moral person — from lower 
forms of life is referred to physical causation 
alone. As the human pedigree has been traced 
up to the simian branch of the animal tree, and 
no ground discovered for absolutely separating 
the latest from the earliest offshoots, our most 
eminent living biologist maintains that when 
Descartes declared all animals to be automata, his 
only error lay in excluding man from the same 
class. This conscious automaton is but the high- 
est term of an animal series whose law of devel- 
opment is already known, and eveiything in his 
constitution is explicable by that law. But the 
evolution of life has realized itself through a 
mechanical process; consequently those distinc- 
tive characteristics which mark off the human 



Darwinism in Ethics. 143 

from the simian species must be the products 
of the same process. As natural selection lias 
endowed all beings with the constitutions and 
habits and faculties which they actually possess — 
the eagle with his eye, the bee with her sting, the 
lion with his rage and strength — so must natural 
selection have endowed man, not only with an 
erect attitude, but also with a reason that looks 
before and after and a conscience that responds 
to right and wrong. The mental and moral fac- 
ulties are both reduced to the rank of natural 
phenomena. Indeed, to express their essentially 
derivative and, as it were, accidental character, 
a new word has been coined, and intelligence is 
described as an " epiphenomenon." By this term 
is meant that consciousness is a merely accessory 
aspect of the human automaton, a psychological 
index of corporeal movements which are the 
prime reality, a reflex of mechanism which would 
go on all the same without any reflex, just as an 
engine would move along the rails if it did not 
whistle, or a bird flv if it cast no shadow. But 
if the school interprets consciousness as an acci- 
dent of the human automaton, it makes conscience 
an accident of this accident. First mechanism 
realizing itself in certain relations (by means of 
natural selection), then consciousness of these 



144 Connection with Metaphysics. 

relations, then approval of their life-conserving 
tendencies, or conscience. The moral faculty is 
the recognition of social relations ; it is the social 
instinct of the animals come to a consciousness of 
itself in man ; and this social instinct is but the 
consolidation of habit, and habit is the pro- 
duct, through natural selection, of random actions 
struck out in the struggle for life. Thus the 
moral nature of man is merged in the mechanism 
of nature. The logical, as the chronological, 
jprius is, therefore, not intelligence, but mechan- 
ical action. The exegesis of Faust receives a 
startling illustration : Im Anfang war die 
That 

This moral theory, therefore, implies and rests 
upon a system of metaphysics. I do not think we 
can too often reiterate that current evolutionary 
ethics is the outcome of a very dubious physico- 
psychical speculation. From overlooking this 
connection the issue between moralists of this 
school and of other schools has not been clearly 
discerned, and the very heart of the question 
has been generally left untouched. I do not, of 
course, mean to call in question the results of the 
astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological 
sciences. "What one teaches about the gradual 
formation of the universe, and another about the 



Darwinism in Ethics. 145 

gradual development of organisms on our globe, 
I accept implicitly. But because minerals and 
plants and the lower animals appeared before 
man, I will not, therefore, hold that they were 
adequate conditions to his production, or that 
there is nothing in him that was not generated 
through actions and reactions between an animal 
system and its physical or social environment. 
Such a doctrine used to be called material- 
ism, but in deference to the feelings of specu- 
lative evolutionists the word has nowadays been 
dropped. All the objections, however, which 
were formerly urged against the derivation of 
mental and moral functions from material com- 
binations, however finely organized, are still valid 
against the evolutionary identification of intel- 
ligence with the modifications produced in the 
nervous and muscular systems from action and re- 
action between the organism and its environment. 
Man is later on the scene than the unintelligent 
organisms ; but whence his intelligence we know 
not, unless it be the emergence of something 
new from the fountain of being, from the under- 
lying ground and sustaining cause of the whole 
evolutionary movement. Certainly it was not 
evolved by mere repetition of mechanical actions. 

Were intelligence not at the heart of the cosmos, 
10 



146 Both Indefensible. 

it could not have turned up as the crowning glory 
of the development of life. 

The same position may be taken up in oppo- 
sition to the current evolutionary ethics. Biology 
warrants the belief that non-moral beings existed 
on our globe long before the appearance of the 
only moral being we know — man ; and natural 
selection explains the process by which the latter 
may have been descended from the former. But 
natural selection, as we have already shown, cre- 
ates no new material ; it merely sits in judgment 
upon what has already appeared. Given acts, or 
habits, or moral practices, natural selection is the 
name for the survival of the fittest of them, not 
the talismanic cause which originates any of them. 
However they originate, they must have a defi- 
nite relation to the constitution of the being that 
manifests them ; and to suppose that moral sen- 
timents, moral notions, moral practices, could be 
grafted upon a primitively non-moral being is, in 
the first place, to take a grossly mechanical view 
of human nature and, in the second place, to 
transgress the limits alike of natural selection and 
of evolutionary science. Yet this is what is done 
by our evolutionary moralists. A moral law, they 
tell you, is the formulation by intelligence of the 
social practices instinctively followed by the more 



Darwinism in Ethics. 147 

or less unintelligent ancestors of man, these prac- 
tices themselves having crystallized into habits 
from an inchoate chaos of random acts. We have 
in the preceding chapter considered Darwin's 
derivation of instincts from casual actions, and 
we have here only to inquire whether conscience 
is nothing but the social instinct illuminated by 
intelligence. Were it so, we could not fail to ad- 
mire the manner in which morality was forced 
upon unwilling beings until at last appeared an 
intelligence capable of freely accepting it and 
heartily setting about its realization. As in the 
education of the human race, according to Les- 
sing, religion is at first revealed only that it may 
ultimately become rational, why should not the 
practice of morality at first have been compulsory 
that it might in due time become free and gra- 
cious ? But, after all, I believe an analysis of 
the facts will not suffer us to take this view of the 
providential government of the world. In the 
contents of the moral consciousness I find unique 
elements, unlike anything that went along with 
the earlier stages of the development of life, and 
absolutely incapable of resolution into practices 
useful for social survival blindly followed by the 
non-moral precursors of humanity. If the social 
instinct is, as the theory supposes, only a means 



148 Wreck against Right and Duty. 

of preserving society, how could intelligence ever 
take it for more than that ? But in the moral 
consciousness of mankind there is clear recogni- 
tion of an absolutely worthf ul. And, in the next 
place, if this be denied, there remains one ele- 
ment in the moral consciousness that forever dis- 
tinguishes it from a mere intelligence-illumi- 
nated social instinct, namely, the sense of duty. 
Even if moral law be supposed nothing more than 
the expression of devices wrought out uncon- 
sciously in the course of aeons, for securing the 
vitality and well-being of society, why do I recog- 
nize myself under obligation to observe the law ? 
This consciousness of duty, the most certain and 
mostimperious fact in our experience, whence does 
-it come if man have no moral fibre in his prim- 
itive constitution? On this rock the ethics of 
Kant, giving scientific shape to human morality, 
is firmly intrenched. And no better testimony 
to its security could be found than the shifts to 
which evolutionists are put when they attempt to 
resolve this element of the moral consciousness 
into race-accumulated experiences of utility. Mr. 
Spencer, indeed, supposes men to have been scared 
into moral obligation by the baton of the primi- 
tive policeman, the ostracism of primitive society, 
and the hell of the primitive priest. How a 



Darwinism in Ethics. 149 

society could exist to deal out these political, so- 
cial, and religious sanctions, unless it rested on a 
moral basis, the evolutionist does not explain. 
And one may, therefore, be pardoned for seeing 
here only another of the countless attempts to de- 
rive morality from ideas and institutions which 
already presuppose it. The varepov rrporepov is 
the bane of evolutionary ethics. Naturally 
enough, the sentiment produced by the terrors of 
ancient law, politics, and religion, will decay with 
the cessation of its causes ; and as Mr. Spencer 
identifies this sentiment with moral obligation, one 
can understand how he reaches the paradox that 
the u sense of duty, or moral obligation, is transi- 
tory." In another way the same conclusion is 
reached by M. Guyau, who follows Darwin. Con- 
science is the social instinct, he says, and the scien- 
tific spirit is the great enemy of blind instincts ; 
it illuminates them, and in the flood- tide of light 
dissolves them ; what habit has made, reflection 
unmakes ; and nothing can save morality when 
conscience has met the doom of every instinct — 
dissolution under scientific reflection. " Pan, the 
nature-god, is dead ; Jesus, the man-god, is dead ; 
there remains the ideal god within us, duty, which 
is also, perhaps, destined one day to die." But the 
irrefragable reply to these oracular prophecies is 



150 Spencer and Guy an on Duty. 

that they rest upon a misreading of the actual 
record. If moral obligation be the effect of cer- 
tain historical causes, it may decline with the de- 
cadence of those causes, and if conscience be a 
blind instinct, it may follow the supposed law of 
dissolution of instincts ; but the conditional ground 
of the consequence is in neither case established, 
in neither case does it z^est upon evolutionary 
science, in neither case has it any antecedent 
probability apart from the a priori prejudice of 
the utilitarian in favor of the derivative charac- 
ter of morality and the moral faculties. Instead 
of so accounting for the rise of a moral sense and 
moral obligation, as a kind of accident in our con- 
stitution, mankind (a few metaphysicians apart) 
persists in regarding them as of the very essence 
of human nature. The absolute " ought " cannot 
be the product of any experience with the primi- 
tive policeman or priest, since (apart from the fact 
that there would be neither without it) experience 
only records what is advantageous for certain ends 
and cannot, therefore, enjoin anything categori- 
cally. Hence the pretence of the evolutionists 
to have reconciled the experiential and intuitive 
schools of ethics cannot be sustained. Those pre- 
dicates of the moral law which, in the earlier part 
of this chapter, we found the evolutionary theory 



Darwiiiism in Ethics. 151 

claiming to account for — its simplicity, universal- 
ity, etc. — are not its essential attributes ; so that, 
even if the evolutionist's contention be granted, he 
leaves untouched the fundamental constituents of 
the moral consciousness — our sense of an abso- 
lutely worthful, the right, not merely the useful, 
and our recognition of its authority over us as 
expressed in the word " ought." For these ideas 
no experience can account, and every experiential 
theory virtually explains them away as the indis- 
pensable condition to its own plausibility. How- 
ever long the process, whether extending through 
one generation, as the older utilitarians imagined, 
or through countless generations, as the e volutiono- 
utilitarians assume, there never will be success, as 
Lotze justly observed, in fetching into an empty 
soul, by means of the impressions of experience, a 
consciousness of moral obligation. 

T^or, in fact, does evolutionary science, relieved 
of the metaphysical baggage with which it has 
hitherto been grievously freighted, require us to 
believe in the possibility of this desperate feat. 
It assumes that morality has been developed 
through natural selection. And because natural 
selection presupposes a utility — a fittest that sur- 
vives — the evolutionists have fallen into the fal- 
lacy of supposing that morality was nothing hat 



152 Their Fundamental Fallacy. 

a utility. That is the explanation of the plausi- 
bility of their ethical theory as expounded in the 
earlier part of the present chapter. And no other 
refutation, after all that has been said, need now 
be added except the reminder that natural selec- 
tion, though wide-awake to the uses of things, is 
blind to their nature and essence. It takes ad- 
vantage of the utility of morality, but no more 
determines its content and meaning than a posi- 
tivist who passes over the question of the essence 
of things. It acts upon germs of all kinds, once 
they have been produced and are moving through 
phases of development ; but it knows not what the 
germs are, whence they come, or what develops 
them. The whole question, so far as ethics is 
concerned, turns on the nature of those primitive 
modifications out of which morality has been 
evolved. But on that point evolutionary science 
has no answer of its own to give, and the blank 
lias been filled by the preconceptions of evolu- 
tionary speculators. Subordinating, as the school 
has hitherto done, intelligence to mechanism, it 
has invariably sought the first germ of con- 
science in a random action that proved useful to 
the species in which it was struck out. We 
have, on the contrary, maintained that this hypo- 
thetical derivation passes over the very essence 



Darwinism in Ethics. 153 

of the moral consciousness ; nor can we imag- 
ine any other way of deriving it which does not 
already presuppose it. In opposition to this 
mechanical theory of conscience, we hold that it 
is an ultimate function of the mind, and that 
in germ as in full fruition it must he regarded, not 
as an action, but as an ideal of action. The con- 
sciousness of right and wrong is underived, and, 
like intelligence in general, witnesses to a supra- 
sensible principle in man — a principle which the 
wheels of mechanism, grinding through eternity, 
could never of themselves produce. This view 
of the subject may be affiliated to Darwinism as 
readily as the other. For an abiding ideal of ac- 
tion is, to say the least, quite as beneficial as a 
chance action ; and wherever there is an advan- 
tage, there natural selection may operate. But 
natural selection does not determine the mate- 
rial upon which it works. Given the forms of 
primitive morality, whatever they be, natural se- 
lection only settles which shall perish and which 
survive. Its function is the negative one of sift- 
ing whatever has attained to positive existence. 
In the book of Job, Satan represents, according 
to Professor Davidson, the testing, sifting prov- 
idence of God : natural selection is the Satan of 
the evolutionary powers. Strange, indeed, that it 



154 Further Objections. 

should ever have been mistaken for the powers 
themselves ! 

The ethical conclusions here reached and co- 
ordinated with the doctrine of evolution and Dar- 
winism (which I everywhere take for granted) 
are so opposed to those of most evolutionists 
that some fallacy may be supposed to infect all 
our reasonings. After the evolutionary teachings 
of the last twenty years, it seems either blindness 
or disingenuousness to maintain that evolution 
leaves our ethical problems precisely where it 
found them. And so, in spite of all the preced- 
ing analyses and criticisms, the old objections 
are sure to recur. Does not the evolutionary 
doctrine of heredity imply that man is what his 
ancestry has made him, and so abrogate our be- 
lief in the freedom of the human will ? And 
does not goodness cease to be divine when you 
have explained moral laws as a statement of the 
habits blindly struck out and blindly followed by 
simian or semi-human groups in the struggle for 
existence ? If morality is merely a formulation 
of the practices which, accidentally hit upon by 
some group of animals, made the group coherent, 
and thus enabled it to vanquish rival groups with 
different practices, would it not seem merely ac- 
cidental that justice and truthfulness are vir- 



Darwinism in Ethics. 155 

tues, and not injustice and lying ? For if these 
vices, or others, had enabled those primitive semi- 
human societies to survive, they would not have 
been vices, but virtues ; for virtue is nothing but 
a useful means of social survival. Will not evo- 
lution, then, as thus interpreted, work revolution 
in our views of the moral nature of man, since 
it implies that morality is not grounded in the 
nature of things, but something purely relative 
to man's circumstances — a happy device whereby 
man's ancestors managed to cohere in a united 
society and so kill out rival and disunited groups ? 
Now, it is not necessary to deny either the so- 
cial utility of morals or the influence of heredity 
in order to show that, -whatever the first appear- 
ance, evolution is not in reality revolution in the 
sphere of man's moral nature. It is no doubt 
true that heredity supplies us with much of the 
material out of which we make our characters. 
But it is only by an oversight that we identify 
our character with the inherited elements out of 
which we form it. As Aristotle profoundly ob- 
served, nature does not make us good or bad, 
she only gives us the capacity of becoming good 
or bad — that is, of moulding our own characters. 
Emphasize as you will, then, the bulk of the in- 
heritance I have received from my ancestors, it 



156 Evolution not Revolution. 

still remains true that in moral character I am 
what I make myself. On stepping stones of their 
dead selves men rise to higher things ; and 
neither our ability to do this, nor the conscious- 
ness of that ability implied in the freedom of the 
will, is affected in any way by evolution. 

But surely, it will be objected, evolution does 
mean revolution in our views of human nature, 
if it makes moral rules a mere social utility. I 
admit the conclusion, but reject its premises. 
For, as I have already urged, the facts of human 
life will not allow us to interpret morality as a 
mere accidental arrangement whereby our animal 
ancestors came out victorious in the struggle for 
life. I do not deny that morality would, as a 
matter of fact, be useful to any society practising 
it in the war of all against all in the struggle for 
life. That it is useful is clear from the readiness 
with which people follow Hamlet's advice to his 
mother and assume a virtue when they have it 
not. But if morality be nothing more than mere 
social utility, a mere device which enabled man's 
ancestors to kill out rival groups, I fail to under- 
stand how there has arisen in man a conscience 
which makes cowards of us all ; a remorse which 
drives a Lady Macbeth to madness, and a Judas 
to suicide; a sense of eternal right so strong that 



Darwinism in Ethics. 157 

no theory can make us believe we are hoodwinked 
into righteousness, truth, and justice, by the mere 
accident that lying, injustice, and unrighteousness 
were less useful in holding primitive societies 
together and enabling them to kill out their 
rivals. And all this might be conceded by the 
evolutionist, had he not fallen into the fallacy of 
holding that, because virtue is socially useful, 
therefore it is nothing but a social utility. There 
are other things besides morality which favor the 
survival of primitive societies. We have already 
spoken of the advantages of an erect attitude and 
of a sound intelligence. Yet the evolutionist 
does not call these characters mere social utilities. 
The eye, for example, has no existence among 
the lowest animals ; yet when it does appear, its 
own new story is accepted as a fresh revelation 
of fact. Instead of describing it as an advantage 
in the struggle for life, the evolutionist sees in 
the new organ the possibility of a deeper com- 
munion with reality ; and the more developed 
the organ the more valuable its evidence. The 
earliest eye was probably nothing more than a 
tingling sensitiveness to light and darkness. The 
most developed eye discerns a spectrum of seven 
colors ; and along with this advance it has also 
acquired the capacity of measuring distances, 



158 Sense, Intellect, Conscience. 

magnitudes, and situations. Both these func- 
tions of the eye were eminently useful in the strug- 
gle for life: they enabled their animal possessor 
to get food more easily and escape foes more 
deftly. Yet the evolutionist does not hold the 
eye is merely a utility. Bringing the surprise of 
something new and unexpected, the eye, he will 
recognize, is useful only because it makes us 
aware of fact. But if you accept the evidence of 
the eye when it testifies to the colors or sizes of 
objects, you cannot reject the depositions of con- 
science to the moral character of conduct and 
motives. This is a new mental function, and has 
the same claim upon you as the other. The va- 
lidity of the intuition, "Injustice is wrong," is 
neither greater nor less than the validity of the 
perception, " Snow is white." The vision of both 
the outer and the inner eye is useful, but useful 
simply because each gives us new revelations of 
reality. 

The same result is reached by comparing the 
deliverances of conscience with the discoveries of 
intelligence. The lowest animals have neither 
conscience nor reason. The infinite advantage of 
either we have already described. Even the 
germ of reason suffices to make man lord of crea- 
tion. Think only of the significance of the dis- 



Darwinism in lit hies. 159 

covery that twice two are four. An intelligence 
advanced to that point is on the way to geometry, 
trigonometry, and the calculus, to all those sciences 
whose application has changed the face of the 
material world. As the highest mathematics is 
useful to us, so was the first germ useful to our 
ancestors. But it does not, therefore, follow that 
arithmetic is merely a social utility. On the 
contrary, it is useful for the reason that it brings 
man into deepening relation with fact ; but its 
validity is wholly independent of its advantage 
to mankind, and only the satirist could suggest 
that twice two would be five if that product 
were more advantageous to us. Arithmetical 
facts cannot be determined by a plebiscite of 
utilitarians. And the same is true of the de- 
liverance of conscience that injustice is wrong. 
Ultimate mathematical principles and ultimate 
moral principles have the same intuitive evi- 
dence ; and it is not weakened by the assumption 
that man owes his bodily organism to animals in 
which there was no trace either of a moral or a 
mathematical faculty. Fact is fact ; and neither 
morality nor geometry ceases to be objectively 
grounded from the accident that our ancestors 
only gradually came to an apprehension of them. 
From all points of view, then, we are led to the 



1 60 Evolutiono-utiliiarianism. 

same result. Evolutionary science in general, 
natural selection in particular, does not necessi- 
tate, or even indicate, a new system of ethics. It 
stands logically indifferent between intuitionism 
and utilitarianism, though from the accident that 
most expounders of evolution happened to be 
utilitarians there has arisen a belief that the two 
were in some way connected. In reality, evolu- 
tionary ethics, as hitherto expounded, is nothing 
but an arbitrary combination of utilitarianism in 
one or other of its forms with a speculative meta- 
physics which discovers the ground of mind and 
conscience in an antecedent physical or nervous 
mechanism. And as such it not only has no sup- 
port from evolutionary science^ but is at the same 
time exposed to all the objections which the 
common-sense of mankind has always brought 
against every empirical theory of morals and 
every mechanical theory of intelligence. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE ETHICAL SPECULATIONS OF DARWIN. 

From our consideration of the logical bearings 
of evolutionary science upon the fundamental 
questions of morals we now pass to an examina- 
tion of the ethical speculations of Darwin. It 
will be advisable to begin with an exposition of 
his views, after which we shall have to inquire 
into their validity, as well as determine their re- 
lation to evolutionary biology. And, for reasons 
that will be evident as we proceed, the account 
of the moral faculties must be supplemented by 
an account of the intellectual faculties. 

Darwin himself confesses that the greatest ob- 
stacle to the acceptance of the hypothesis which 
he had framed to account for the phenomena of 
life lies in the high standard of man's intellectual 
powers and moral disposition. And his endeavor 
is to show that the mental faculties of man differ 
only in degree, and not at all in kind, from those 
of the lower animals ; and that man's moral at- 
tainments are, under evolution, the necessary cor- 
11 



1 62 Human Mind Evolved. 

relate of this superiority of intellectual power. 
We have now to follow this process of affiliating 
human reason and conscience upon animal intel- 
ligence and instinct. 

On the origin of intelligence in our world 
Darwin disclaims the knowledge which some 
other evolutionary thinkers profess. In what 
manner the mental powers were first developed 
in the lower organisms he holds " as hopeless an 
inquiry as how life itself first originated." He 
accepts the facts as he finds them, without pro- 
fessing to explain them. Animals are alive and 
intelligent ; the law of the evolution of life is 
known ; what if the development of intelligence 
were subject to the same law ? If man, physically 
considered, is just a highly developed animal, is 
he more on his mental side? Is not his intel- 
lect, like his physical organism, the product of 
natural selection ? It must certainly be admitted 
that, wide as the interval confessedly is between 
the mental powers of the lowest man and the 
highest ape, it is not so wide as the interval be- 
tween the highest ape and a fish like the lamprey 
or lancelet ; and if this latter interval is filled by 
numberless gradations now in existence, it is not 
impossible that the blank between the human 
and the simian mind may once have been covered 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 163 

by intervening varieties which are now totally- 
extinct. And so far as regards the action of 
natural selection in the evolution of mind, if, as 
must be admitted, such slight beneficial varia- 
tions of intelligence, as may now be perceived to 
occur among animals and to be inherited by their 
offspring, occurred in the past history of the 
world, and gave the individuals so favored an ad- 
vantage in the struggle for life ; then it cannot 
be doubted that natural selection, which issues 
in the survival of the fittest, must always have 
spared the most intelligent animals, and might, 
therefore, in the course of ages, by perpetuat- 
ing the transmitted intelligence of countless gen- 
erations of victorious combatants, have at last 
evolved such a combination of mental powers as 
enabled their fortunate possessor, the veritable 
heir of all the ages, to make weapons for the de- 
struction of his enemies, to use tools for procur- 
ing the satisfaction of his own wants, to utter 
articulate sounds for conveying information to his 
fellows, and, finally, with many additional accom- 
plishments, to come forth as man, the most domi- 
nant of all living creatures, the grandest intellect- 
ual and sole moral being in this terrestrial world. 
The probability thus established by analogy 
of general inference, that man's mind is simply a 



164 Compared with Animal Mind. 

development from the brute's, differing from it 
only in degree, is strengthened by Darwin's com- 
parison of the two, as manifested in all the forms 
of intelligence from blind sensation up to self- 
conscious reason. In the instincts of self-preser- 
vation, sexual love, and mother-love, man and 
beast do not differ. And since both have the 
same organs of sense, they agree in sensuous per- 
ception. Like man, too, the lower animals feel 
pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. They 
experience, also, the same emotions. With them, 
as with us, terror causes the muscles to tremble, 
the heart to palpitate, and the hair to stand on 
end. Courage and timidity we may see in our 
dogs, good and bad tempers in our horses, rage 
and revenge in monkeys and other animals. A 
dog may be as jealous as his mistress, and as fond 
of praise as the urchin she sends to school. 
African monkeys have been known to die of 
grief for the loss of their young. 

Great as the animal capacity for emotion there- 
fore is, it does not, however, exceed the concomi- 
tant intellectual power. All animals feel wonder, 
and many exhibit curiosity. Darwin gives an 
amusing account of the mental struggle which 
monkeys in the Zoological Gardens underwent, be- 
tween their instinctive dread of snakes and their 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 165 

curiosity to peep into a paper bag containing one, 
which he placed among them. Monkeys have 
also the faculty of imitation to a wonderful de- 
gree. And attention, the indispensable condition 
of all intellectual progress, is conspicuous in any 
animal waiting for its prey. Memory, too, they 
share with us. After an absence of five years 
and two days, Darwin's dog followed and obeyed 
him exactly as if he had " parted with him only 
half an hour before." The power of imagination 
is evidenced by the sounds and movements of ani- 
mals during their dreams. And of the highest 
faculty of the human mind Darwin says, " only 
a few persons now dispute that animals possess 
some power of reasoning." For example, the 
Vienna bear that deliberately made with his paw 
a current in some water, which was close to the 
bars of his cage, for the purpose of drawing a 
piece of floating bread within his reach, must 
have performed the same inductive reasoning as 
the lowest savage or the highest scientist. 

If it is said, in reply, that man alone is capa- 
ble of progressive improvement, this must be pro- 
nounced doubtful in face of the fact that old ani- 
mals are harder to catch than young ones ; that 
birds in the course of a very few years cease to kill 
themselves by flying against new telegraph-lines; 



1 66 Use of Tools and Speech. 

that animals both lose and acquire caution in re- 
lation to man and other animals, and that our 
domestic dogs have attained to moral qualities un- 
known to the wolves and jackals from which they 
are descended. 

Nor does the capacity to use tools imply, as has 
been urged, a fundamental difference between 
the mental powers of man and of other animals ; 
for the chimpanzee, in a state of nature, cracks a 
fruit somewhat like a walnut with a stone, and 
troops of Abyssinian baboons have been known 
to attack their foes, human and simian, by rolling 
dowm stones from the mountains upon their heads. 
So that apes as well as savages use weapons and 
implements ; and though savages now grind and 
polish stones for definite purposes of utility and 
defence, as did also their neolithic ancestors, the 
most primitive men who have left any record of 
themselves, the men of the palaeolithic age, had 
not advanced beyond the use of rough, unground 
stones, which differed from the natural tools and 
weapons of the apes only in being slightly 
though rudely fashioned. 

The possession of articulate speech is regarded 
by naturalists, like Huxley and Cuvier, and phi- 
lologists, like Max Miiller, as the grand distinctive 
character of man ; but Darwin holds that Ian- 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 167 

guage has been developed from the cries and gest- 
ures of the lower animals. The difference lies 
solely in the infinitely larger power which man 
possesses of associating together the most diver- 
sified sounds and ideas. And this power, like 
language itself, has been slowly and unconsciously 
developed by many steps. The beginning of 
language was not improbably made by some wise 
ape-like animal imitating the growl of a beast of 
prey, for the sake of warning his companions of 
the expected attack — much as at present fowls 
give one another warning of the hawk, and mon- 
keys utter signal-cries of danger to their fellows. 
It is true that no existing ape uses his vocal or- 
gans for speech ; but this entitles us to infer only 
that his intelligence is not sufficiently advanced. 
The first speaking progenitor of man must have 
had far more highly developed mental powers 
than the chimpanzee or gorilla. But there is 
nothing in the faculty of articulate speech, so 
Darwin concludes, which offers " any insuperable 
objection to the belief that man has been devel- 
oped from some lower form." 

Neither, then, in the higher intellectual facul- 
ties nor in language, which has contributed so 
much to their development, does Darwin find 
anything to prove that the immense difference 



1 68 Conscience. , 

between the mind of the lowest man and that of 
the highest ape is more than a difference of 
degree. The moral sense, however, he acknowl- 
edges is peculiar to man, and it affords, he main- 
tains, the " best and highest distinction between 
man and the lower animals." But even this 
faculty turns out not to be beyond the genetic 
power of natural selection. For the awful voice 
of conscience, which silenced the scepticism of 
Immanuel Kant and compelled him to a belief 
in the moral communion of man with a super- 
sensible world that pure reason knows not, 
seemed to the scientific epigon of British utili- 
tarianism only the articulate utterance of the 
dumb social instincts of the animal world as, in 
the evolution of animal intelligence, they have 
been developed, partly by expression in language, 
but especially by the ever-deepening conscious- 
ness, inevitable to an advancing intellect, of the 
greater persistency of social instincts in compari- 
son with all other impulses to action. The so- 
cial instincts of the animal are by the purging 
rays of ascending intelligence transmuted into a 
conscience. That sensibility of honor which 
feels a stain like a wound is only the far-off 
tremor of a sympathetic chord whereby some an- 
cestral group of animals, in the dissonant strng- 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 169 

gle for existence, became harmoniously united in 
a common and a victorious defence. 

"Any animal whatever," says Darwin, "en- 
dowed with well-marked social instincts, the pa- 
rental and filial affections being here included, 
would inevitably acquire a moral sense, or con- 
science, as soon as its intellectual powers had be- 
come as well, or nearly as well, developed as in 
man." Not that any social animal, with the 
same mental faculties, would acquire exactly the 
same moral sense as ours ; for the nature of 
the moral sense is determined by the conditions 
of the animal's life. If, for instance, men were 
reared under precisely the same conditions as 
hive-bees, they would possess a conscience which 
required unmarried women, like the worker-bees, 
to kill their brothers, and mothers to kill their 
fertile daughters. 

Conscience, or the moral sense, being, according 
to this theory, derived from sociability, it may 
be worth while glancing at the operations of that 
instinct in the lower animals. That animals are 
social we may see in our horses, cattle, and sheep, 
in rooks, jackdaws, and starlings, in creatures as 
far asunder as ants and monkeys. The most 
common mutual service of the higher animals is 
to warn one another of danger. As danger-signal, 



170 Animal Sociability. 

rabbits stamp on the ground with their hindf eet ; 
and the chamois, as the hunter in Tell knows, 
stamp with their forefeet, whistling at the same 
time. Animals also assist one another in sick- 
ness or distress, even at the risk of life. An 
Abyssinian baboon once returned alone to a pack 
of dogs that had driven off his troop and carried 
away a young baboon which, left behind in the 
rout, was calling piteously for aid. Besides love 
and sympathy, social animals exhibit self-control, 
fidelity to one another, and obedience to the 
leader. The complex tissue of sociability is prob- 
ably an extension of the parental and filial affec- 
tions, originating, like them, in the action of 
natural selection. Under the same imperious 
law, sympathy, too, has been developed, if not ac- 
quired ; for the most sympathetic animals would 
flourish best and rear the greatest number of 
offspring. In case of a conflict between impulses 
or instincts, it is manifest that in the struggle 
for life the one most beneficial to the species 
must in the long run triumph. What if con- 
science were but such a persistent social instinct ? 
We must turn to man to see. 

Man is a social animal. And if we may argue 
from the analogy of the majority of the quadru- 
mana, his ancestors as far back as the simian stage 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 171 

were social likewise. He inherits, accordingly, a 
tendency to be faithf ill to his comrades and obe- 
dient to the leader of his tribe. But his sympa- 
thetic impulses are not, as in some lower animals, 
crystallized into special instincts which define his 
action under all circumstances. Reason and ex- 
perience must, at least in later stages, be the main 
guides of his conduct. But as he is a sympathetic 
animal, he must also be influenced greatly by the 
wishes and opinions of his fellow-men, whose ap- 
probation he courts, whose blame he strives to 
avoid. This motive to conduct would be at its 
strongest when reason was at its weakest. Hence, 
while the rational philosopher of modern times 
makes little of the opinion of others, and, feeling 
himself the supreme judge of his own conduct, 
sets his heart against violating in his person that 
dignity of humanity of which he believes himself 
the bearer, his savage ancestor, ignorant of the 
sentiment of humanity, has just reason enough to 
recognize the force of public opinion in the set 
of individuals with whom he happens to be asso- 
ciated, without any thought of the rest of man- 
kind, or with the thought of them only as ene- 
mies. The social instinct, developed in the 
struggle for existence through natural selection, 
must, willy-nilly, have been the supreme law of 



172 Grows into Moral Sense. 

life for primitive man as for liis ape-like fore- 
fathers. 

It is now in this abiding sympathetic impulse, 
acquired through natural selection for the good of 
the community, that we must seek the origin of 
the moral sense, or conscience. Already in its 
persistency over other impulses we may discern 
a basis for the supremacy of the moral law. A 
permanent and strong instinct in the presence of 
an evanescent impulse awakens a feeling of obli- 
gation, which we express by saying that it ought 
to be obeyed. " A pointer dog, if able to reflect 
on his past conduct, would say to himself, ' I 
ought (as, indeed, we say of him) to have pointed 
at that hare, and not have yielded to the passing 
temptation of hunting it.' " But this preroga- 
tive of approving and disapproving is what con- 
stitutes man a moral being — the sole moral ani- 
mal. It is, as it were, a voice lent by intelligence 
to the dumb instincts and impulses to action that 
struggle in the breast of every animal. Why, 
then, is conscience more than a simple expression 
of the motives at play ? If the instinct of self- 
preservation or of vengeance has triumphed over 
the social instinct, why does a man regret that he 
followed the one natural impulse rather than the 
other, and why does he further feel that he ought 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 173 

to regret his conduct ? Here is a profound differ- 
ence between man and the lower animals ; but 
Darwin finds an explanation of it in the immense- 
ly superior development of man's mental faculties. 
Reflection is an unavoidable incident of an in- 
telligence so highly developed as man's. Images 
of all past actions and motives would pass inces- 
santly through the mind of the earliest human 
being. With him, as with other social animals, 
the sympathetic instincts would be ever present 
and persistent ; while the instincts of self-preser- 
vation and hunger, or the impulse to vengeance, 
are in their nature transitory, or scarcely ever 
present to consciousness. Accordingly, when an 
impulse to vengeance has mastered man's social 
instincts, he reflects and compares the now fad- 
ing idea of this impulse with the ever present 
social instincts. On one side he finds the gratifi- 
cation of vengeance at the cost of his compan- 
ions ; on the other, the outgoings of his own ever 
present spontaneous sympathy, re-enforced with 
the knowledge that his comrades consider it 
praiseworthy ; and the consequence is that that 
feeling of dissatisfaction which invariably re- 
sults from any unsatisfied instinct now arises, 
as soon as it is perceived that the enduring and 
always present social instinct has yielded to 



174 A ided by Reflection. 

some other instinct, at the time stronger, but 
neither enduring in its nature nor leaving be- 
hind it a very vivid impression. Thus retribu- 
tion comes when the strong impulse which im- 
pelled to revenge has grown weak in memory and 
seems as nothing before the ever-enduring social 
instincts and the desire to stand well with oth- 
ers. Hence regret, remorse, and penitential tears. 
And the poor sinner will " consequently resolve, 
more or less firmly, to act differently for the fut- 
ure ; and this is conscience, for conscience looks 
backward and serves as a guide for the future." 
This conscience, which thus springs by reflection 
out of the sympathetic impulses to action, is 
moulded by the approbation and disapprobation 
of others, the appreciation of which also rests on 
sympathy ; and after the power of language has 
been acquired, the expressed will of the commu- 
nity naturally becomes the paramount guide to 
individual action. Habit further confirms the 
individual in virtuous conduct, until at last such 
perfect self-command is acquired that he yields 
instantly and without a struggle to his social sym- 
pathies and instincts, including his feeling for the 
judgment of his fellows. It is probable that the 
habit of self-command, so laboriously attained, 
may be transmitted to offspring. And thus man 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 175 

finally comes to feel, through acquired and, per- 
haps, inherited habit, that it is best for him to 
obey his more persistent impulses. These alone 
give meaning to the imperious word Ought, 
which " seems merely to imply the consciousness 
of a rule of conduct, however it may have origi- 
nated." 

Such is Darwin's famous theory of the moral 
sense. Its significance for speculative ethics is 
a sufficient justification of the detailed account 
here given of it — an account I have striven to 
make accurate, often by reproducing the very 
language of the original. The next considera- 
tion is, whether an unprejudiced seeker after 
truth can rest in Darwin's theory as a satisfac- 
tory philosophy of morals. 

One thing must be stated at the outset. Dar- 
win's treatment of the phenomena of morals dif- 
fers essentially, not only from his treatment of the 
phenomena of life, but also from his treatment of 
the phenomena of intelligence. Nor is the con- 
trast difficult to explain. Life, as all admit, is 
common to man and the animals ; and, as Dar- 
win adduced grounds for believing, there is no 
fundamental difference between human and ani- 
mal intelligence. Now, if Darwin's aim was to 
break down the wall of partition which unscien- 



176 Darwin s Ethical Method Unique. 

tific dogma had erected between the various species 
of living beings, it was not necessary for him to 
inquire into the absolute beginning of life or of 
intelligence ; and, as we have already seen, this 
problem he specifically set aside. It sufficed for 
his purpose that human and other animals were 
alive and intelligent, however they may have be- 
come so ; and the only question he set himself 
was how, beginning with the lower forms, the ad- 
vance in physical and psychical organization had 
been effected. But even to this restricted ques- 
tion his answer is, as we have found, a mixture of 
science and nescience. By far the most impor- 
tant part of the process of evolution is veiled 
in inscrutable mystery. The development from 
lower to higher life and intelligence has not been 
sudden, but gradual, we are told ; yet we no more 
comprehend the cause of the one than of the oth- 
er, and ultimately fall back upon a belief that it 
is because organisms have innate tendencies to 
vary. But that assumed, everything is assumed ; 
for natural selection, which Darwin discovered, is 
only the name for the survival of the fittest among 
all those forms which nature so mysteriously 
flings forth. "What Darwin, therefore, maintains 
of organization and intelligence amounts only to 
this : given the lower phases, there is somehow 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 177 

a progress to higher phases, the best of which 
natural selection is constantly preserving. But 
in the moral world he finds no such common 
starting-point. He does not pretend that the 
phenomena of conscience, like those of life and 
mind, are alike exhibited by man and brute. 
Had he done so, he might here, too, have con- 
tented himself with the assertion of a develop- 
ment from the one to the other by means of 
natural selection, leaving the essence of the pro- 
cess as mysterious as he left it in the case of 
life or mind. And to this assertion, were it sup- 
ported by analogous facts, no one could have 
objected who accepts his theory of the evolu- 
tion of life. The germ, he might have said, 
however it originated, somehow grows into the 
various forms of animal conscience, and at last 
culminates in the conscience of man ; and the 
distance between the moral sense of the high- 
est animal and the lowest man, he might have 
repeated, is not greater than that between the 
lamprey and the dog. Unfortunately, however, 
for the consistency of this scheme, he finds no 
animal conscience. With the recognition of that 
blank, one might suppose the author of the theory 
of natural selection, with his habitual caution, 
would venture no farther. But the combined in- 
12 



178 Unlike his Scientific Method. 

fluence of an inherited empirical psychology and 
ethics and a newly discovered evolutionary biology 
proved too fascinating even for the cautious, fact- 
revering Darwin. Since there is no animal con- 
science to begin with, and since man's has to be 
'" accounted for, " one must be manufactured as its 
antecedent. Darwin accordingly takes sociability, 
which is common to man and beast, as one ele- 
ment, and for the other element, high intelligence, 
which is peculiar to man ; and from their combi- 
nation, by a kind of psychological chemistry, gets 
you a primitive conscience. Elsewhere the fa- 
mous scientist lays before you different species 
with their intervening forms, many of which he 
has himself actually produced ; and from a sur- 
vey of all the facts concludes there is no absolute 
distinction between them. But here he treats 
you to an imaginary psychology — imaginary facts 
and imaginary processes, w r hich have no other 
warrant than his own preconception of the deriv- 
ative character of the moral faculty. The sure- 
footed investigator here roams at random over 
an impalpable void that offers no foothold ; and 
soaring in his flight, you may follow, but cannot 
catch him. He has deserted the kingdom of fact, 
which no mortal had ever half so well mastered, 
and, in an incautious moment, embarked upon the 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 179 

barren seas of speculation, with all their shoals 
and quicksands, "where armies whole have sunk." 
This departure, in the case of morals, from the 
scientific method of the " Origin of Species " is 
certainly very remarkable, though no one, so far 
as I know, has ever called attention to it. Had 
Darwin, I repeat, treated conscience as he treated 
the mental faculties, there would have been no 
ground of complaint. His mental philosophy may 
be summed up in the statement that the various 
grades of intelligence shade into one another so 
imperceptibly that it is not possible to distinguish 
them absolutely, even at the point where the ani- 
mal differentiates into the human mind — an inter- 
val which, moreover, is not greater than that 
between the intelligence of the fish and the intel- 
ligence of the elephant. This may or may not be 
a tenable contention ; but it is at least supported 
by facts, and so amenable to refutation. It seems 
to me false from omissions rather than in the po- 
sitions it specifies. For, supposing the difference 
between the canine or simian mind and the mind of 
a savage to be no greater than the theory requires, 
there is, nevertheless, a pertinent distinction too 
significant to be passed over in silence — the one is 
capable of appropriating the accumulated knowl- 
edge, culture, and civilization of the most ad- 



180 Human and Brute Mind Different. 

vanced spirits ; the other is not. This capacity 
for development should count for something in 
framing a genealogical table. And that I have 
not overestimated it is evidenced by the uncon- 
scious testimony of Darwin, who, speaking of the 
Fuegians as the " lowest barbarians," yet adds : 
"I was continually struck with surprise how 
closely the three natives on board II. M. S. 
Beagle, who had lived some years in England 
and could talk a little English, resembled us in 
disposition and in most of our mental faculties." 
As he is, the native Fuegian may not be much 
more intelligent than an elephant ; but then, he 
is capable of hecoming so much more ! 

Still, whether Darwin is right or w T rong in this 
matter does not now concern us. My present 
point is, that in his mental philosophy he makes 
no attempt to derive any of the mental powers. 
He takes them as he finds them, and studies their 
different manifestations and gradations. Man has 
more reason than the monkey : Darwin notes the 
fact without pretending to explain whence that 
reason came or what the essence of reason is. 
The lancelet has no imagination ; the dog has : 
Darwin recognizes the appearance of a new power 
in the more developed animal without professing 
to account for its entrance upon the field. Had 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 181 

he in the same way disclaimed any knowledge of 
the origin and the essence of conscience (whether 
taking it for a uniquely human endowment or 
not) his moral philosophy would have had the 
same scientific character as his mental philosophy. 
Whether he held that the moral faculty first ap- 
peared in man or germinated it* some lower ani- 
mal, his position would be of the nature of a sci- 
entific hypothesis which could be adjudged by 
the facts. But when, in violation of his own in- 
variable practice elsewhere, he here professes to 
show us the non-moral material out of which the 
moral faculty was manufactured, and the very 
process of its making, we cannot resist the sus- 
picion that he has fallen upon the vain problem 
of trying, as Lotze put it, to find out how exist- 
ence was made. 

This attempted derivation of the moral faculty 
by Darwin has, it will now be seen, no connection, 
either in matter or in method, with that biologi- 
cal science which is often designated Darwinism. 
We must distinguish, henceforth, between Dar- 
win the ethical speculator and Darwin the ob- 
server and interpreter of facts in natural history. 
The lack of this distinction has led to endless con- 
fusion. Naturalists have supposed that Darwin's 
biology carried with it his theory of conscience, 



1 82 Conscience Inderivable. 

while moralists, repudiating the latter, thought 
they were called upon to demolish Darwinian 
science. What a chaos of absurd disputation has 
been thus engendered, the Darwinian literature 
of the last generation too abundantly evinces. 
These fruitless contentions arise from a miscon- 
ception which is clearly evident in the light of 
the preceding chapters. That mass of fact and 
theory which naturalists and moralists have im- 
agined unitary is really twofold, with two distinct 
centres of gravity. Without maintaining, in gen- 
eral, in opposition to Mr. Herbert Spencer, that 
biology has nothing to do with ethics or ethics 
with biology (though this is not incapable of de- 
monstration), we do assert with the greatest con- 
fidence that, even if Darwin's theory of the origin 
of species and descent of man is sound, his specu- 
lations on morals will not, therefore, be sustained 
or confirmed, since the two rest on wholly dif- 
ferent bases, which are at no point coincident, and 
which no reasoning can bring together. 

The absolutely unique treatment which ethical 
phenomena received at the hands of Darwin may 
be still further illustrated in yet another way. It 
has been shown already that, in his own province 
of natural history, Darwin makes no attempt to 
derive that life whose mysteriously expanding 



Darwin's Ethical Theory. 183 

phases he seeks to arrange in a graduated scale. 
But besides mere life there is spirit, with its 
powers of apprehending the true, the good, and 
the beautiful. And with regard to those mental 
powers which, conversing with reality, seize upon 
the truth, we have found Darwin registering 
their progressive manifestations without any pre- 
tence of accounting for their origin. The logical 
faculty, the mathematical faculty, he accepts as 
ultimate facts ; and whether they are comparable 
with animal activities or not, he recognizes the 
futility of pretending to show how they came 
into being. The same holds of his treatment of 
the sense of the beautiful. Without attempting 
a genesis of the sesthetic faculty, he contents him- 
self with observing, among animals in all stages 
of development, actual instances of perception 
of the beautiful. And a wonderful collection of 
facts he makes, as fascinating as novel and fresh ! 
The observations constitute the decisive moment 
in his theory of sexual selection. As natural se- 
lection turns upon the success of both sexes in the 
struggle for life, sexual selection depends upon 
the success of certain individuals over others of 
the same sex in relation to the propagation of the 
species. Among nearly all animals there is a 
struggle between the males for the possession of 



184 Sense of Beauty Left Ultimate. 

the females. The slightest favorable variation 
would enable the victorious possessor to propagate 
it, be it a modification adapted to destroy rival 
wooers or to win the coveted female. To the 
first class belong those weapons of offence and de- 
fence — the courage and pugnacity, the superior 
strength and build — in which most males differ 
from the females. Still more interesting is the 
second class. For courtship among the lower an- 
imals is far from being simply a matter of brute 
force. The females appear to have much more 
freedom of choice than the women of the lowest 
races of mankind. The male, therefore, has not 
only to conquer his rivals, but to win the female. 
And the female, such is the animal sense of 
beauty, is most excited by, or prefers pairing with, 
the more ornamental male, or the male which 
sings best or plays the best antics. Hence, in a 
state of nature, the females by a long selection of 
the more attractive males have gradually added 
to their beauty or other attractive qualities. And 
Darwin shows in a most ingenious manner how, 
owing to female susceptibility to beauty, the 
charms of the males of the most different orders 
and species have been acquired through sexual se- 
lection. His illustrations fill a volume, but none 
of them are more delightful than those refer- 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 185 

ring to the ornaments of male birds — their brill- 
iant tails, their combs and wattles, their gorgeous 
plumes, their elongated feathers, their top-knots, 
and so forth. 

There is no need, however, of here following 
farther Darwin's theory of sexual selection. It 
is alone with the animal sense of the beautiful, 
on which the theory rests, that we are now con- 
cerned. That faculty, be it observed, Darwin ac- 
cepts as he finds it, ready-made ; his task is merely 
to trace its operations in the various orders of as- 
cending life. What may be the nature and the 
source of the psychical organization that enables 
beings to perceive the beautiful, Darwin no more 
considers than the cognate question concerning 
the powers that apprehend the true. But when he 
treats of the faculty that discerns the good, i.e., 
conscience, he undertakes to show us whence it 
came and how it was made ! This unique inno- 
vation in method is tantamount to a transition 
from science to speculation. 

Darwin's conjectural ethics, then, we may now 
conclude, is wholly unsupported by his observa- 
tional biology. 

The next question is, How does the theory 
accord with the facts ? Surrendering the unde- 
served prestige they have hitherto enjoyed from 



1 86 Meaning of Conscience. 

association, through an illustrious name, with 
evolutionary science, are the ethical speculations 
of Darwin in themselves tenable ? To answering 
this question the rest of the present chapter must 
be devoted. 

The centre of gravity of Darwin's hypothesis 
is the assertion that conscience is the product of 
well-marked social instincts and advanced intel- 
ligence. Given these, " any animal whatever," so 
he tells us, " would inevitably acquire a moral 
sense, or conscience." This proposition we have 
now to examine. We want to understand how 
and why conscience is begotten of intellect and 
sociability. 

Conscience, as popularly conceived, is a term 
of somewhat vague signification. It comprises 
intellectual and emotional phenomena, standing 
at once for the power that discovers and enforces 
the good and avenges its violation or rewards its 
observance. It is aptly described, in Butler's fe- 
licitous confusion, as a sentiment of the under- 
standing and a perception of the heart. But what 
common-sense thus unites, analytic philosophers 
have disjoined. One school holds that conscience 
has a purely intellectual function, the recognition 
of moral law ; another insists it is nothing but 
feeling, a pain more or less intense attendant on 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 187 

violation of duty. It matters little in what sense 
this or any other term is used in philosophical 
literature, provided only the definition be given, 
though there is a manifest advantage in keeping 
as close as possible to popular usage. What is 
of importance is that in fixing the connotation of 
words the things to be named shall not be over- 
looked. And that all the moral phenomena re- 
ferred by the vulgar to conscience actually exist 
will not be questioned by any thinker (whatever 
his definition of the word conscience) who has 
ever perceived one course of action to be right 
and another wrong, who has recognized the au- 
thority of the right over him, and who, on defy- 
ing the right and choosing the wrong, has ex- 
perienced the pangs of remorse. 

As Darwin supplies us with a theory of the 
genesis of conscience, it is necessary to determine 
what he means by that term. Is the function of 
the Darwinian conscience the perception of right 
and wrong, or the recognition of the authority of 
the right, or the remorse that follows upon vio- 
lation of that authority ? Is it any or all of 
these ? 

To this question I find it difficult to obtain a 
definitive answer. Darwin was a naturalist ; and 
the natural sciences of which he was master do 



1 88 Ambiguities of Darwin s Usage. 

not stand in need of such precise definitions as 
the more complex sciences of mind. Besides, for 
all but experts, definitions of mental phenomena 
are exceedingly difficult to frame. Perhaps we 
may thus explain the ambiguity m Darwin's use 
of the term conscience. In the fourth chapter 
of " The Descent of Man " we are told, in the 
opening sentences, that " the moral sense, or con- 
science, . . . has a rightful supremacy over 
every other principle of human action ; it is 
summed up in that short but imperious word 
ought, so full of high significance." But in a later 
passage we hear " of the moral sense, which tells 
us what we ought to do, and of the conscience, 
which reproves us if we disobey it." Further, 
conscience is described as an " inward monitor " 
urging towards "one impulse rather than the 
other," and again, in the same paragraph, as a 
" feeling of right or wrong." To complete the 
confusion it is once more coupled with remorse ; 
and the man who has been visited with this ret- 
ribution will, according to Darwin, " consequently 
resolve more or less firmly to act differently for 
the future; and this is conscience, for conscience 
looks backwards and serves as a guide for the 
future." 

No logic, I apprehend, can extract from these 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 189 

descriptions a consistent definition of conscience. 
Yet, without it how are we to test Darwin's the- 
ory of the origin of conscience ? One way is still 
open. Though we are unable to determine from 
Darwin's statements the character of the phe- 
nomenon to be produced, he yet furnishes us with 
the elements and the process of its production. 
These we may study in the expectation of dis- 
covering the nature of their result. Given socia- 
bility and intelligence as generating factors of 
x (" conscience "), the problem is to find x. I 
repeat, we ought to know what is meant by con- 
science, since this is the phenomenon whose 
genesis we seek ; but, failing that, nothing re- 
mains but to assume the agencies and operations 
posited by Darwin, and then examine what they 
can produce and what they are incapable of pro- 
ducing. 

Turning to the famous chapter already men- 
tioned for Darwin's account of the subject, we 
learn there is a " main point, on which . . . 
the whole question of the moral sense turns. 
Why should a man feel that he ought to obey one 
instinctive desire rather than another ? . . . 
Why does he regret having stolen food from 
hunger ? " 

This problem presents no peculiar difficulty to 



190 Genesis of Conscience. 

anybody not pledged to a system of derivative 
morality. The answer is simple enough. Man 
perceives some desires to be higher or nobler than 
others, he recognizes an obligation to admit the 
better and exclude the worse, and he cannot defy 
this authority without incurring the penalty of 
remorse. Admit there is a scale of worth and 
authority among our impulses to conduct, as well 
as an order of intensity, and the whole difficulty 
vanishes. This, however, is what our current 
evolutionary school, for reasons more conceiv- 
able than cogent, has persistently declined to do. 
The undeniable deliverances of consciousness are 
in some way to be " accounted for," as though 
you could explain why the whole is greater than 
its part, or twice two four, or benevolence more 
excellent than envy ! 

Let us consider Darwin's solution of the prob- 
lem he has raised : " Why does man regret that 
he has followed one natural impulse rather than 
another?" 

In all such cases, according to Darwin, regret 
is the concomitant of a violation of the social in- 
stincts on the part of the selfish instincts. It can- 
not be due to the greater strength of the former, 
for, as a matter of fact, the social instincts in man 
are not stronger than the instincts of self-preser- 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 191 

vation, hunger, etc.; and were they stronger, it is 
not easy to see how they could ever have been 
overpowered by the weaker. But "the social in- 
stincts are ever present and persistent." And a 
being with mental faculties as high as man's can- 
not avoid reflecting upon past actions and motives, 
and comparing the satisfaction of hunger, ven- 
geance, etc., at other men's cost, with the almost 
ever present instinct of sympathy, which " forms 
an essential part of the social instinct, and is in- 
deed its foundation-stone." Now, such desires as 
hunger, vengeance, and the like, are in their nat- 
ure of short duration ; and after being satisfied, 
are not vividly recalled. Hence, when the images 
of these past and now weakened impressions are 
compared with the ever enduring social instincts, 
and with public opinion, the thief, or avenger, w T ill 
feel as if he had been balked in following a pres- 
ent instinct or habit, and find himself the prey of 
remorse, regret, or shame. 

It is not conscience, therefore, as popularly 
understood, but only remorse, whose genesis Dar- 
win is really tracing. Does he succeed even in 
this limited endeavor ? 

The plausibility of the deduction is due to the 
assumption that " the social instincts are ever 
present and persistent," while hunger, vengeance, 



192 Fallacious Asswnption. 

lust, etc., are not. What Darwin maintains about 
these last impulses is psychologically true : they 
may be readily and completely gratified, and nei- 
ther the attendant pains nor pleasures are sus- 
ceptible of vivid representation in consciousness. 
And, on the other hand, the influence upon the 
individual of the social organism or social factor 
seems scarcely capable of exaggeration to those 
who have taken to heart the teachings of Herder 
and the great German thinkers of the eighteenth 
century, or of Comte, Mill, and Lewes in the 
nineteenth. Nevertheless, when the social prin- 
ciples of conduct are enumerated one by one, no 
one would venture to assert that compassion, be- 
nevolence, gratitude, justice, veracity, or humanity, 
is an " ever present and persistent instinct." Man 
is moved both by egoistic and altruistic springs of 
action, and no psychology would imitate the Dar- 
winian irony of making the latter the more en- 
during. On the contrary, as in the Darwinian 
theory, the instinct of self-preservation comes 
earliest ; and as the filial, parental, and social in- 
stincts are derived from it by means of natural 
selection ; there would be grounds for maintain- 
ing that the one omnipresent and persistent im- 
pulse is the egoistic one of self-preservation. At 
any rate, it is only through the illicit comparison 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 193 

of one whoU class with some of the individuals 
composing another that Darwin wins a primacy 
for the social instincts. Compare compassion or 
gratitude with lust or hunger, and you would not 
say that the individual social impulse is more per- 
sistent or enduring than the individual selfish 
impulse ; or compare the whole class of social in- 
stincts with the whole class of selfish instincts, 
and, again, you find no difference in the times of 
their presence or persistency. Take, on the other 
hand, the entire species of social instincts and 
only two or three individuals from the selfish 
group, and, of course, you may predicate of the 
former a more constant presence and greater per- 
sistency. It is, now, by this utterly fallacious 
procedure that Darwin gains the fundamental 
proposition in his deduction of the moral sense 
(that is, as we have seen, remorse). Instead of 
granting that the social instincts exclusively are 
ever present and persistent, we must maintain 
they have no title to those predicates which can- 
not be urged with equal or greater validity on 
behalf of the selfish instincts. 

But even if Darwin's assumption that the social 
instincts are ever present and persistent were con- 
ceded, it would not enable him to educe con- 
science or remorse. For, suppose these instincts 
13 



194 Further Objection. 

located in a being of high mental powers — and 
that is all the theory postulates — what is there 
to carry the non-moral possessor over into the 
status of a moral agent ? Evolutionists of the 
current school are apt to slur over this step, and 
the hiatus is not observed by their readers be- 
cause, for the most part, they fail to realize that 
the moral has here been made to emerge, not from 
an antecedent kindred germ, but from the ab- 
solutely non-moral. When Darwin tells them 
that a highly intelligent being, reflecting upon the 
past triumphs of lust, vengeance, or hunger, over 
more benevolent impulses, cannot escape the bit- 
terness of remorse or shame, they assent to the 
proposition as expressing a fact of their own ex- 
perience. But they overlook the all-important 
difference that they are already moral beings, and 
that the highly intelligent animal Darwin speaks 
of is not. Why, then, should this non-moral in- 
telligence experience remorse? The selfish in- 
stinct of hunger or lust had its way only because 
it was at the time stronger than the social check. 
And in this superior intensity a reflecting, non- 
moral being could not fail to find its justification. 
Had the more powerful impulse been restrained, 
there would have arisen (to appropriate language 
of Darwin's) " that feeling of dissatisfaction, or 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 195 

even misery, which invariably results from any 
unsatisfied instinct." And as this misery is pro- 
portionate to the intensity of the impulse sup- 
pressed — greater when this is stronger, lighter 
when it is weaker — every reflecting being, unin- 
fluenced by moral considerations, and governed, 
therefore, only by a Benthamite calculus of pleas- 
ures and pains, would be driven to the inevitable 
conclusion, that true wisdom consisted in fol- 
lowing the strongest impulse (except when it 
might entail a future balance of pain — a con- 
tingency rarer for non-moral than for moral 
beings). The case may be represented as fol- 
lows : At a certain moment in the past, a selfish 
instinct, being stronger than a social instinct, was 
gratified by the corresponding conduct, and pro- 
duced a clear surplus of pleasure over the pain at- 
tendant upon the violation of the weaker social 
instinct ; had the latter been satisfied to the 
suppression of the former, there would, for the 
same reason, have been a surplus of pain over 
pleasure. This actual state of things, now, can- 
not be altered by the most arduous reflection upon 
it. Hence those images of past actions and 
motives which, according to Darwin, incessantly 
pass through the minds of highly intelligent ani- 
mals must, so far as this particular case is con- 



196 No Escape From It. 

cerned, generate a pleasurable consciousness akin 
to that formerly produced by the remembered 
events themselves. 

The non-moral intelligent being, then, that 
followed the strongest impulse, be it an egoistic 
or an altruistic impulse, would have the best 
reasons for self-gratulation. One consideration, 
however, as already hinted, might suffice to give 
him pause. The strongest instinct, though pro- 
ducing the most pleasure momentarily by its 
gratification, might not produce the greatest sur- 
plus of permanent pleasure. And if so, this 
would be a reason for a non-moral being sup- 
pressing it. But Darwin makes no such supposi- 
tion ; nor would it in the least serve his purpose. 
For his problem is to generate conscience, and he 
rightly saw that, though a non-moral being who 
preferred a momentary to a permanent pleasure 
might, on reflection, deem himself short-sighted, 
imprudent, or even foolish, such a being could have 
no experience of that heart-breaking emotion of 
remorse which Darwin identifies with conscience. 

Darwin makes remorse the concomitant of the 
recollection of suppressed social instincts ; yet in 
the results, actual or possible, entailed by the 
suppression we find no ground for remorse, while 
as regards the act of suppression, due as it was 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 197 

to the pleasure-giving triumph of a selfish in- 
stinct, we have seen that a non-moral being, re- 
flecting upon it, could have i\o other feeling than 
self-complacency. But (it will be objected) the 
non-moral being who formerly gave way to sel- 
fishness is supposed by Darwin to be, at the 
moment of reflection, under the influence of the 
ever present and persistent social instincts and 
sympathies ; and it is in their reinstalled light 
that the former outburst of egoism now appears 
shameful and fills the reflecting agent with re- 
morse. This supposition, which is manifestly 
borrowed from the experiences of a moral being, 
presupposes one of two conditions, either of 
which is absolutely destructive to the ethical hy- 
pothesis of Darwin. If reflection upon violated 
social instincts could engender such sentiments in 
a non-moral intelligence, either the reflection is 
very inadequate or a worth is attributed to the 
social sentiments hitherto denied them by the 
theory. Suppose the reflection thorough and 
complete, then what avail the solicitations of 
present sociability to color and distort the images 
reflection evokes ? A developed intellect will 
not confound the present with the past, or fool- 
ishly dream that, because at this moment a tri- 
umph of the social instincts would be pleasur- 



198 Egoism versus Sociability. 

able, it would always have been pleasurable in the 
past. It could not but recall that just as at pres- 
ent the social impulses happen to be dominant, so 
at other times hunger, vengeance, and lust hap- 
pen to be dominant ; and to slip the one force is 
as natural and as praiseworthy, from this non- 
moral point of view, as to slip the other. But 
the social instincts, says Darwin, are more present 
and enduring than the selfish instincts. Even if 
this contention, which I have already adduced 
grounds for rejecting, be for the moment con- 
ceded, it will not help out the demonstration. 
For you cannot argue that because selfish im- 
pulses do not come so often or stay so long as so- 
cial impulses, they have therefore less right to the 
field when they actually do put in an appearance. 
Granting that the times of sociability are greater 
than the times of selfishness, this time-measure 
does not explain why I feel remorse over acts of 
vengeance or robbery. And if the meaning is 
that I shed penitential tears over them solely be- 
cause I am at present transported by a wave of 
sociability, this would lead to the absurdity that 
when the egoistic instincts had the upper hand, 
reflection would then produce remorse for pre- 
vious acts of benevolence and compassion involv- 
ing sacrifice to myself ! 



Darwin s Ethical Theory. 199 

Thorongh-going reflection, then, will not gener- 
ate remorse in a being that recognizes no differ- 
ence in impulses to action except degrees of dura- 
tion and intensity. The Darwinian hypothetical 
moral ancestor does feel remorse. He must 
therefore have already arrived at a perception of 
the relative worth of competing springs of con- 
duct. What Darwin calls the social impulses this 
incipient moral agent already recognizes as higher 
and nobler than what Darwin calls the selfish im- 
pulses. The one has a claim upon him, the other 
has not. That claim, the mute though awful ap- 
peal of goodness to a free moral agent, he may 
defy ; but, unless his heart is hardened, that de- 
fiance brings the terrible yet blessed retribution 
of remorse. How all this is so, why all this is so, 
we know not. Voltaire's words deserve, in these 
days of derivative and genetic philosophy, to 
be written in letters of gold : " What inconsist- 
ency ! We know not how the earth produces 
a blade of grass, or how the bones grow in the 
womb of her who is with child, and yet we would 
persuade ourselves that we understand the nature 
and generation of our ideas." 

Darwin attempts to derive remorse (which he 
calls "conscience") from measuring sociability 
against selfishness in the mind of a non-moral 



200 Conscience presupposed. 

being. The derivation, I think we have shown, 
is a failure. It becomes plausible only when we 
grant, as Darwin does not, though the reader 
generally does, that our hypothetical ancestor has 
an intuitive perception of the superior excellence 
of social over selfish instincts. And so it appears 
that it is this inderivable moral consciousness, 
this sense of right and wrong, this conscience, 
and not any psychological play of egoistic and 
altruistic impulses to action, that constitutes at 
once the possibility and the foundation of re- 
morse. Darwin's derivation of it turns out a 
gigantic varepov irporepov. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL IDEALS AND IN- 
STITUTIONS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE 
FAMILY. 

The history of moral ideals and institutions, 
though hitherto ignored by moralists, seems to 
me the most important topic in the whole realm 
of ethics. Therein is to be found, along with a 
fuller comprehension, the solution of many of 
those vexed questions which have never failed to 
stimulate, and have always baffled, the ingenuity 
of all the schools of analytic philosophers. To 
have aroused interest in a matter so significant 
is no trifling addition to the crown of Darwin's 
glory. But it was really almost by accident that 
Darwin stumbled upon the subject. As Saul, the 
son of Kish, was looking for his father's asses 
when he found a kingdom, so Darwin, the epigon 
of speculative utilitarianism, was casting about for 
supports to his more than dubious theory of con- 
science when his glance fell upon this vast, prom- 



202 Darwin as Moralist. 

ising, though yet uncultivated domain of histori- 
cal ethics. Indirectly, indeed, he suggested the 
way which a positive " science " of ethics would 
have to follow ; but for himself, he remained an 
ethical speculator of the old-fashioned type, with 
all the preconceptions and with the same compla- 
cent confidence of the derivative school whose 
traditions he had inherited. But his procedure 
enables us to illustrate, in a concrete instance, 
the difference between science and speculation 
in ethics. The observation and classification of 
ethical facts, whether manifested in the individ- 
ual or in the race, constitute the business of the 
" science " of ethics ; all else is hypothesis, specu- 
lation, fancy. The phenomena of the individual 
moral consciousness, Darwin presumably turned 
over to the writers of systematic text-books ; and 
the phenomena of the historical development of 
morality among mankind he drew upon only 
to illustrate his speculations on the origin of 
conscience — speculations which he followed his 
school in supposing the principal subject-matter 
of ethics. From infection with this speculative 
spirit evolutionary moralists have not yet recov- 
ered, and they still put upon us as " science " con- 
jectures and phantasies as far removed from fact 
as the republic of Plato or the paradise of Mil- 



The Evolution of Morality. 203 

ton. This must serve as excuse for repeating 
here the main conclusion of our first chapter — 
namely, that ethics, if it is to become truly a sci- 
ence, must shun the path of speculation and fol- 
low closely the historical method. 

The citation of facts from savage morality, 
though merely for purposes of illustration, consti- 
tutes, I have said, Darwin's most worthf ul contri- 
bution to morals. His speculative ethics is, in- 
deed, generally supposed to be an organic part of 
that evolutionarv science whose basis he laid in 
biology ; but it has been shown in the preceding 
chapters that Darwinian biology is absolutely in- 
different to every philosophy, and has no more 
logical connection with the metaphysical and eth- 
ical views that have been grafted upon it by Dar- 
win and others than with the opposite views. 
Further, it has been shown that, in themselves 
considered, Darwin's ethical speculations, whether 
judged by their internal self -consistency or their 
adequacy to the external facts, are wholly unsat- 
isfactory and untenable. To the arguments on 
which these conclusions were based we need not 
here recur. But another point remains, which 
might, indeed, be passed over in a mere examina- 
tion of Darwinism, but which, as it is suggested 
by Darwin's appeal to savage morality, cannot be 



204 History in Ethics. 

beyond the scope of our present inquiry, while it 
is, besides, of such transcendent significance for 
the future of ethics that I could not in any case 
decide to omit it altogether. I allude to the bear- 
ing of the history of morality among civilized and 
uncivilized races upon current systems of moral 
philosophy. What light does our present knowl- 
edge of the development of moral conceptions, 
ideals, and institutions among mankind throw 
upon that fundamental problem of ethical specu- 
lation, the nature of the moral law ? 

This question, unfortunately, has not hitherto 
been considered in exclusive relation to the his- 
torical facts. As was inevitable from the lack of 
a positive science of ethics, founded upon the act- 
ualities of history and of life, it was prejudged 
by theoretical moralists according to the specula- 
tive standpoints which they happened to occupy. 
Now, as all the diversities of ethical thought may 
be reduced to two main types, represented respec- 
tively by the hedonistic and the intuitive schools, 
the facts of historic morality were forced into 
the service of these opposing systems. Accord- 
ing to the one party, they showed that morality, 
in itself eternal and immutable, was universally 
recognized and practised among men ; according 
to the other party, they confirmed the theory 



The Evolution of Morality. 205 

that moral laws were but the empirically estab- 
lished prescripts for securing the largest quantum 
of pleasure to the greatest number of individuals. 
It may indeed be questioned whether historical 
ethics ever really touches, much less confirms, the 
point which either of these parties has most at 
heart. If the main issue between them turns 
upon the question of the chief end of life, the 
summum bo?ium, then whether it is pleasure, as 
the hedonist assumes, or goodness, as the intu- 
itionist assumes, cannot, I apprehend, be deter- 
mined by a study of the morals of savages and 
barbarians any more than by a study of the 
morals of Christians. And if the issue turns 
rather on the absoluteness or relativity of the 
moral law, then if by " absolute " is meant valid 
for all spirits, human and divine, and if by "rel- 
ative" is meant dependent upon circumstances, 
I do not see how comparative morals, in this 
case either, can decide the controversy. But if, 
dropping these speculative puzzles, we shift our 
position altogether and raise the simple induc- 
tive inquiry, What acts have men everywhere 
and at all times considered right or wrong re- 
spectively, and what acts have some considered 
right or indifferent and others wrong ? tables of 
agreement and difference can be drawn up to 



206 What it can tell Us. 

show what mankind at least has regarded as the 
essential content of the moral law (and some ex- 
planation might even he suggested of the diver- 
gence in the outlying area beyond this common 
circle), though we should still be unable to say 
whether the end of life was pleasure or some- 
thing else, or how this common human morality 
might be regarded by other spirits, as, for ex- 
ample, by God. For the rich harvest which this 
treatment of the moral field is sure to yield we 
shall have to wait until the spirit of science has 
exorcised the spirit of speculation from our con- 
tending schools of ethics. Only a single plot of 
the field has as yet been cultivated, and that not 
by moralists, but by anthropologists, philologists, 
jurists, historians, and observant travellers. I 
may mention especially the works of McLennan, 
Morgan, Tylor, Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, Sir 
Henry Maine, Robertson Smith, Hearn, Lyall, 
Letourneau, Coulanges, Schmidt, Ploss, and Lip- 
pert. The investigations which they have con- 
ducted, w T ithin recent years, into the origin and de- 
velopment of the family relations constitute an 
important chapter in the yet unborn science of 
historical ethics. 

Among all the virtues, none is more sacred to 
Christendom than chastity, and none has been 



The Evolution of Morality. 207 

supposed more primitive in its history or intui- 
tive in its nature. The views and sentiments en- 
tertained by all Christian nations toward it are 
expressed at once, with accuracy of delineation 
and nobility of style, in a fine apostrophe in the 
fourth book of Milton's " Paradise Lost: " 

"Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source 
Of human offspring, sole propriety 
In Paradise of all things common else ! 
By thee adulterous lust was driven from men 
Among the bestial herds to range ; by thee, 
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, 
Relations dear, and all the charities 
Of father, son, and brother, first were known. 
Far be it that I should write thee sin or blame, 
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place, 
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets, 
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced, 
Present or past, as saints and patriarchs used. 
Here love his golden shafts employs, here lights 
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, 
Reigns here and revels ; not in the bought smile 
Of harlots — loveless, joyless, unendeared, 
Casual fruition." 

In this sublime passage are voiced assumptions 
that were universal in Milton's time and all but 
universal to-day. It is implied that in the begin- 
nings of human life, while everything else was 
common, women were already individually appro- 
priated by men, or, in other words, that mo- 



208 Assumptions about the Family. 

nogynous and monandrous marriage obtained ; it 
is further implied that this is the only natural 
form of relation between man and woman, Hy- 
men excluding the very idea of casual connec- 
tion ; and it is finally implied that from this ex- 
clusiveness in "wedded love" alone could spring 
a tree of family relationship with its flower of 
domestic virtues. Whether these assumptions are 
facts, or uncritical dogmas having no other sup- 
port than the inertia of incurious tradition, is 
the first question we have to consider. And 
should it appear from the investigating torch of 
history that the assumptions are illusory, w r e 
should then have to determine in what way the- 
ories of ethics were affected by the discovery. 
Having rejected Darwin's supposition of a meta- 
morphosis of the absolutely non-moral into the 
moral, it would be incumbent upon us to find 
some other interpretation of the late emergence 
of chastity, should history show that chastity was 
not at the first universally recognized as a virtue. 
The first scientific study of the history of mar- 
riage w r as made by the late Mr. J. F. McLennan 
in an interesting and highly original work, pub- 
lished in 1865 under the title of "Primitive 
Marriage," and republished in 1876 as " Studies 
in Ancient History. 55 The object of the work is 



The Evolution of Morality. 209 

to determine the development of conjugal rela- 
tions among mankind by an examination of the 
origin and meaning of the symbol of capture in 
marriage ceremonies. The next epoch-making 
work was Mr. Lewis II. Morgan's "Systems of 
Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Fam- 
ily," which appeared in 1871 in the " Smithso- 
nian Contributions to Knowledge " (vol. xvii.), 
and was afterward reproduced in a condensed 
and more readily available shape in " Ancient 
Society " (pt., iii., pp. 383-521). It is an attempt 
to trace the growth of the family by a compara- 
tive study of the methods of reckoning relation- 
ship. These investigations into the early history 
of the family are in themselves so valuable, and 
in reputation so classic, that we cannot do better 
than set out with them. They give us facts and 
theories together ; but it will not be hard to sep- 
arate these and form an independent judgment 
on the amount of support the facts give to the 
theories. 

McLennan starts with the existence and preva- 
lence of the form of capture in marriage cere- 
monies. It must be a survival, he thinks, of a 
system of actual wife-stealing. If the members 
of a triWe were allowed to marry within the 
tribe — that is, in the felicitous mintage of Mc- 
14 



2io McLennan s Theory of the Family. 

Lennan, if the tribe is endogamous — the symbol 
of capture could not conceivably come into being. 
But if marriage within the tribe were prohibited 
— that is, if the tribe were exogamous — and if a 
state of war usually prevailed between neighbor- 
ing tribes, as was the case in primitive times, each 
tribe could get wives only by theft or force ; and 
the reality of capture would, when friendly re- 
lations came to be established, degenerate into 
the form of capture. Now, it is a fact that ex- 
ogamous tribes exist and have existed. And of 
the prevalence of capturing wives de facto savage 
and barbarous tribes still furnish abundant illus- 
tration. It is also found that the rule against 
marriage between members of the same tribe 
coexists with the practice of capturing wives de 
facto and with the form of capture in marriage 
ceremonies. 

If, then, the capture of women for wives and, 
consequently, the form of capture in marriage 
ceremonies are to be referred to exogamy, what, 
we must next ask, is the origin of exogamy ? A 
survey of the facts of primitive life forbids the 
supposition that it originated in any innate or 
primary feeling against marriage with kinsfolk. 
It may, however, be connected with the practice 
of female infanticide ; and it was this, says Mc- 



The Evolution of Morality. 211 

Lennan, " which, rendering women scarce, led at 
once to polyandry within the tribe and the capt- 
ure of women from without " ( u Ancient His- 
tory," p. 111). In the struggle for life the 
instinct of self-preservation triumphed over the 
Jove of offspring ; and while male children were 
reared to grow up as braves and hunters, female 
children, in youth as in maturity a mere burden 
to the community, were destroyed. And this 
disturbance of the balance of the sexes involved 
wife-stealing and polyandry. 

Another consequence, affecting ideas of kin- 
ship, must be noticed. In the earliest times, 
according to McLennan, the unions of the sexes 
w r ere " loose, transitory, and in some degree pro- 
miscuous" (p. 131). There may then have been 
no perception of relationship, for relationship is 
rooted in a physical fact — the fact of consanguin- 
ity ; and this, like other objects of observation 
and reflection, was probably long overlooked. 
But when it was first perceived, the idea of blood- 
relationship was embodied in a system of kinship 
through females only — as was natural when pa- 
ternity was absolutely uncertain. Now, however, 
when the original poly and rous and polygynous 
promiscuity was so far qualified, in consequence 
of the killing of female children, as that several 



212 Its Actual Facts. 

men were assigned to one woman and she to 
them, exclusively, and when to this rudest form 
of polyandry succeeded that (practised by the 
Tibetans) in which the husbands are all brothers, 
it became for the first time possible to determine, 
if not the father, at least the blood of the father ; 
and as a consequence there began to emerge a 
system of kinship and inheritance through males, 
which received its full development when mar- 
riage became monogamous and paternity, there- 
fore, indisputable. How this new system of 
reckoning relationship adapted itself, in the case 
of exogamous tribes, to the practice of marrying 
within the tribe, which was permissible under 
the system of female kinship and had practically 
made the tribe endogamous, it does not concern 
us here to explain. We are interested in Mc- 
Lennan's speculations only in so far as they con- 
cern the forms of family relations and the mo- 
rality of them. 

Now, for that purpose, nothing is of more con- 
sequence than the facts ; and McLennan has put 
it beyond doubt that the phenomena of infanti- 
cide, wife-stealing, exogamy, polyandry, kinship 
through females as well as through males, and 
tribal intermarriage or endogamy, are all to be 
found within the area of savagery and barbarism. 



The Evolution of Morality. 213 

A new theory may of course be formed of the 
order of their connection, or sequence ; but it 
is the indisputable merit of McLennan to have 
shown the existence and prevalence of the phe- 
nomena themselves. One could almost wish that 
so keen an observer had contented himself with 
collecting and grouping facts of savage life, an 
increase of which would scarcely have failed to 
sober his speculations. For nothing is more 
striking in his work than the disproportion be- 
tween the vastness of his hypothesis and the 
comparative scantiness of the facts adduced to 
support it. It does not appear unreasonable to 
suppose that among savages who generally mar- 
ried within their own tribe wives should, when 
opportunity offered, have been stolen from other 
tribes ; and even descent through females may 
always, as it does to-day, coexist with descent 
through males. In any case, we shall require a 
much larger collection of evidence than has yet 
appeared to convince us that every branch of the 
human family has gone through precisely the 
same course of development. Yet this supposi- 
tion seems to underlie current investigation into 
the history of family relations. The a priori fal- 
lacy would seem to have arisen from confound- 
ing facts with the mind's method of apprehend- 



214 Is Development Uniform? 

ing them. Knowledge, indeed, proceeds from 
the vague to the definite, but, as Lotze used 
to say, existence is under no obligation to con- 
form itself to our method of cognizing it ; and I 
see no warrant for the current assumption, that 
the relations between the sexes began everywhere 
with indefinite promiscuity, and were gradually 
determined, in the manner of an abstract notion 
in logic, into more regulated forms, which at last 
culminated in monogamy. The inexhaustible 
life and variety of historical movements must not 
be sacrificed to the dead, monotonous mechanism 
of the logician's art, whether it be attempted by 
Hegel or by those who criticise him. And the 
elimination of circumstance and accident, which 
experience shows us are so potent in the forma- 
tion and development of contemporary institu- 
tions and habits, is all the more unjustifiable in 
the early history of mankind, when human beings 
were more than now the prey of contingency, and 
yet possessed fewer ideas for extricating them- 
selves from its clutches. Our antecedent expec- 
tation, therefore, would be that the social insti- 
tutions of savages would everywhere be condi- 
tioned by their environment ; and that while in 
one section of the vast area of savagery, where 
women happened to be scarce, polyandry might 



The Evolution of Morality. 215 

be practised, in another, under more normal con- 
ditions, polygyny, or even monogamy, would be 
the general rule. And it is surely a subject of 
amazement in McLennan's theory that polygyny 
does not appear as one of the earliest stages in 
the evolution of the family. When the ances- 
tors of man had most of the animal in them, they 
could scarcely have gone by an arrangement 
which power and sexual jealousy make natural 
for the lower animals. And of the primitiveness 
of polygyny neither biology nor history leaves 
us in doubt. But the coexistence of other forms, 
under different conditions, need not be disputed. 
Indeed, even in McLennan's argument there is 
a tacit confession that endogamy, which with 
polygyny and the family he would make the out- 
come of the long development, must have been 
as archaic as exogamy ; for he observes that the 
separate endogamous tribes are not only as nu- 
merous, but "in some respects as rude, as the 
separate exogamous tribes" (p. 116). 

McLennan imagines primitive men to have 
wandered about in hordes without any concep- 
tion of family relations. Their sexual condition 
was one of unqualified promiscuity, in the restric- 
tion of which, through polyandry, he conceives 
all advance to have been made. But although in 



216 Darwin versus McLennan. 

this assumption of " communal marriage," or ab- 
original hetairism, McLennan is followed by Lub- 
bock, Bachofen, and Morgan, the theory receives 
no confirmation either from the physiology and 
psychology of man and other animals or from the 
known customs of savage and barbarous peoples. 
" We may indeed conclude from what we know 
of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds," says Dar- 
win, " that promiscuous intercourse in a state of 
nature is extremely improbable. . . . There- 
fore, looking far enough back in the stream of 
time, and judging from the social habits of man 
as he now exists, the most probable view is that 
he aboriginally lived in small communities, each 
with a single wife, or if powerful with several, 
whom he jealously guarded against all other men " 
("Descent of Man," pp. 590, 591). In archaic 
times there prevailed 

iC the simple plan, 

That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can." 

In the struggle for life and survival of the fittest 
we expect the selection and evolntion of power 
and sexual jealousy. It seems incredible that, 
as a general rule, equal and indiscriminate co- 
partnership in the possession of women should 
have been the outcome of that w r ar of all against 



The Evolution of Morality. 2 1 7 

all. And, indeed, actual evidence of the forma- 
tion of rudimentary societies, by an observer so 
competent as Sir A. Lyall, shows that if the per- 
plexed jungle of primitive society springs out of 
many roots, u the hero is the tap-root from which, 
ill a great degree, all the rest were nourished and 
grown " ("Asiatic Studies," p. 168). Nor do we 
find in the known habits and customs of savages 
any evidence of the very unheroic practice of com- 
munal marriage. McLennan does not attempt to 
establish the point, which is simply postulated as 
a background for the unfolding of his theory. 
In fact, however lax the marital arrangements 
among savages, some kind of permanent union, 
some appropriation of individual women by in- 
dividual men, is always to be found or inferred. 
If the Esquimaux lend their wives, they must 
have wives of their own whom others cannot ap- 
propriate without their consent. Even the Aleu- 
tian Islanders and Fuegians have fixed marital 
relations, and it would be difficult to find more 
degraded tribes than these. 

Promiscuity in McLennan's system is followed 
by infanticide of females, which would naturally 
evolve polyandry and, if carried far enough, wife- 
stealing too. But in considering this practice as 
universally prevalent, McLennan manifestly goes 



218 Infanticide Misinterpreted. 

beyond the limits of possibility. If all clans 
killed their infant daughters, where could women 
be found even to steal ? Under the stress of cir- 
cumstances making it impossible to procure suffi- 
cient subsistence, it is conceivable that savages 
should destroy their young ; but, knowing the 
savage's incapacity for providing against the fut- 
ure, I find it hard to believe that, in the cruel 
grasp of the present, he should discriminate be- 
tween boys and girls when both alike are equally 
burdensome. And Sir John Lubbock assures us, 
that while infanticide has widely prevailed among 
savages, " boys were killed as frequently as girls. 
Eyre expressly states that this was the case in 
Australia " (" Origin of Civilization," p. 81). It 
should further be noted that if, as McLennan 
supposes, female infanticide coexists with exog- 
amy and wife-stealing, it would be difficult to 
explain, not why so many female children are 
killed, but why any are spared, seeing that none 
can be married within the tribe. 

]STo doubt, again, infanticide of females would 
be sufficient to account for polyandry ; but neither 
infanticide (whether of girls or boys or of both) 
nor polyandry can be shown to be practices of uni- 
versal prevalence. It is possible, though not, I 
think, verifiable, that in special circumstances the 



The Evolution of Morality. 219 

killing of female infants may have led to polyan- 
dry ; but more natural explanations may easily 
be found. Sir Henry Maine tells us of the origin 
of a modern case of polyandry : " It is known to 
have arisen in the native Indian army " (" Early 
Law and Custom," p. 12i). And if we suppose 
in primitive times, similarly, a number of men 
torn away from their original seats (in which the 
balance between the sexes may have been even) 
with only a few women among them, we have, 
judging from the analogy of the Indian army^ 
all the conditions required for the emergence 
of polyandry. Now, as Sir Henry Maine has 
pointed out (Op. cit., p. 212), our earliest glimpses 
of a great part of the human race reveal it in a 
state of movement. Fighting, or wandering for 
food, it is not unreasonable to suppose that in 
many cases they settled in new seats with only a 
comparatively small number of women ; and there 
is evidence that some of the islands of the Pacific 
were settled by boat-loads of men with only a few 
of the other sex. Polyandry could thus be ex- 
plained without denying to primitive man those 
instincts of power and jealousy which biologists 
and psychologists alike attribute to him. But, of 
course, it could make no pretence to being an in- 
variable stage for the whole human race in the 



220 Wife-stealing and Polyandry. 

course of its development. On the contrary, it 
would be seen to have originated, under excep- 
tional circumstances, with the strays and waifs 
of humanity. As the only steady cause of ine- 
quality between the sexes was war, which would 
tend to leave the women in excess, it would seem, 
in the absence of other evidence, that polygyny 
was in all probability more primitive and more 
universal than polyandry. 

It is also a fair assumption that female infan- 
ticide should lead to wife-stealing, which might 
ultimately crystallize into the system of exogamy. 
Certainly wife-stealing, like infanticide and poly- 
andry, actually exists ; and, as McLennan was the 
first to point out, the form of capture attests its 
decay among tribes who once practised it. We 
do not, therefore, dispute the facts ; but we do 
question the significance with which McLennan 
endows them. There is no evidence that wife- 
stealing and exogamy were universal stages in the 
evolution of humanity. In fact, the connection 
between infanticide, polyandry, and the capture 
of women is arbitrarily assumed by McLennan. 
Infanticide may coexist with polygyny or mo- 
nogamy. Polyandry and wife-stealing we should 
not expect to find conjoined ; for if tribes are 
brave enough to steal wives, they would not cease 



The Evolution of Morality. 221 

stealing till they had one or more for each man. 
And Mr. Herbert Spencer is authority for the as- 
sertion that " where wife-stealing is now practised, 
it is commonly associated with polygyny ; while, 
on the other hand, polyandry is a trait of certain 
rude peoples who are habitually peaceful " (" Soci- 
ology," i., pp. 646, 647). Thus wife-stealing tribes 
would soon cease to be polyandrous ; and McLen- 
nan is left without a basis for his imaginary 
evolution of Nair and Tibetan polyandry, with 
their ultimate outcome of monogamy and descent 
and inheritance through males. Polyandry is a 
permanent and universal stage in McLennan's 
scheme of family development. Yet we have 
only to remember that women captured by the 
stronger tribe were lost to the weaker to see that 
with the growth of strong tribes, who must have 
had women in excess, there was a concomitant 
decay of weaker tribes, until none but the strong, 
polygynist tribes remained. The polyandrous 
condition was never general, and where it did ex- 
ist, was often so unstable as to pass almost at 
once over into its opposite. 

Similarly, the opposition between exogamy and 
endogamy resolves itself into a vanishing differ- 
ence. It was perhaps inevitable, in the first flush 
of a new discovery, that McLennan should have 



222 Exogamy and Endogamy. 

overlooked facts equally important. It was of 
course known, both from Roman and Hindoo law, 
that persons within a certain degree of relation- 
ship (theoretically, in Hindoo law, persons de- 
scended from the same male ancestor), could not 
intermarry. But McLennan w r as the first to show 
the prevalence of a similar restriction among 
savage and barbarous tribes. Unfortunately, he 
made no study of their social or governmental reg- 
ulations ; and the fact that the members of a cer- 
tain group could not intermarry, taken along "with 
the fact of wife-stealing, seemed to him equiv- 
alent to universal prohibition among kindred. 
But the study of the government of savages is 
tending to the same result as we have just noted 
among the Aryans. Many of the tribes quoted 
by McLennan as exogamous are found to be 
made up of divisions, or gentes (as Morgan calls 
them) ; and while a member of a division is for- 
bidden marriage within it, he may marry in any 
of the other divisions of his tribe. Thus among 
the Iroquois, a "Wolf may not marry in the Wolf 
clan, but he may marry a woman of any of the 
remaining seven clans among the five tribes of 
the Iroquois ; and Sir Henry Maine notices the 
same external circle among the Chinese. It is 
coming, therefore, to be established, that as 



The Evolution of Morality. 223 

among the Romans a man might not marry 
within the prohibited degrees, yet must marry a 
Roman, so among savages there is an endogamous 
as well as an exogamous circle ; and while any 
particular division is exogamous with regard to 
itself, it is endogamous with regard to the re- 
maining divisions of the tribe. 

A word with regard to kinship through females 
must end this survey of McLennan's account of 
the family. That it exists among certain savages 
is undeniable. That it ever existed as a rule for 
the whole human race is an assumption that has 
no probability in its favor, and an assumption we 
have no motive to make when polyandry is found 
not to be an invariable stage in the development 
of marital relations. 

The facts McLennan has brought together are 
eminently valuable. His speculative interpreta- 
tion of them, everywhere ingenious and original, 
is sometimes fanciful and commonly open to the 
charge of unwarranted generalization. 

A somewhat similar verdict must be pronounced 
upon Morgan. 

Morgan undertook to determine the sequence 
of family institutions from systems of reckoning 
relationship. Comparing the systems of many 
tribes^ he held that the entire development of the 



224 Morgan s Theory. 

human family is represented by three great sys- 
tems of consanguinity, which he designated the 
Malayan, the Turanian, and the Aryan. These 
systems rest, not upon nature, but upon marriage ; 
so that, given the system, we may infer the form 
of marriage. It is assumed that each relationship, 
as recognized in language, is what at one time act- 
ually existed under a certain form of marriage. 
The Aryan system is descriptive — that is, it makes 
the relationship of each person specific (as, e.g. y 
brother's son, father's brother's son). The Ma- 
layan and Turanian systems are classijicatory — 
that is, they arrange in categories according to 
generation ("brothers," e.g., including not only 
my own, but the sons of my father's brothers, and 
" sons " including not only my own, but my 
brothers' also). 

A system of consanguinity is naturally slower 
to change than the form of the family whose re- 
lationships it expresses. And thus it is that the 
Malayan system of consanguinity and affinity, 
outliving for unremembered centuries the mar- 
riage customs in which it originated, remains to 
attest the fact that such a family existed when 
the system was formed. This system, though its 
raison d'etre is gone, survives in daily use among 
the Hawaiians and other Polynesian tribes. Un- 



The Evolution of Morality. 225 

der it, all consanguineii, near and remote, are 
classified into five categories. Thus, myself, my 
brothers and sisters, and those whom we call first, 
second, third, and more remote cousins, are all 
without distinction brothers and sisters. My 
father and mother, together with their brothers 
and sisters, and what we call their first, second, 
and more remote cousins, are all without distinc- 
tion my parents. Similarly of grandparents. 
And, below me, my sons and daughters, with 
their several cousins, as before, are all without 
distinction my children. And similarly of grand- 
children. Moreover, all the individuals of the 
same grade are brothers and sisters to each 
other. 

Now, if this system, as we must assume, ex- 
pressed relationships which once actually existed, 
we may deduce from it the form of the family in 
which it originated. This can be no other than 
what Morgan calls the consanguine family — that 
arising from the intermarriage of brothers and 
sisters, own and collateral, in a group. Since 
the relationships recognized in the system are 
identical with those emerging from the consan- 
guine family, the latter must have been the ba- 
sis of the system of consanguinity. An illustra- 
tion or two will make this clear. The system 
15 



226 Consanguine Family. 

makes the children of my several brothers and 
sisters my sons and daughters: the reason lies 
in the consanguine family, in which all my sis- 
ters and my brothers' wives are my wives. Were 
I a female, the foregoing relationships would be 
the same ; for, in the consanguine family, my 
several brothers being my husbands, their chil- 
dren by other wives would be my step-children, 
w T hich relationship being unrecognized, they nat- 
urally fall into the category of my sons and 
daughters. Every relationship of the Malayan 
system is explicable on the assumption of the con- 
sanguine family, and no other ; consequently the 
system is evidence conclusive of such a family. 

Under the Turanian system of relationship, 
while my brothers' children continue to be mine 
as well as his, and mine his as well as mine, there 
is a departure from the Malayan system in mak- 
ing my sister's children my nephews and nieces, 
and my children her nephews and nieces. From 
this initial difference between the two systems fol- 
low all other differences. Without noticing them, 
let us ask at once what kind of family does the 
Turanian system of consanguinity presuppose as 
its basis ? And the answer is clear : A family 
differing from the consanguine only in its pro- 
hibition of marriage between own brothers and 



The Evolution of Morality. 227 

sisters. That is to say, it is a family founded 
upon the intermarriage of several sisters, own and 
collateral, with each other's husbands in a group, 
the joint husbands not being necessarily kinsmen 
of each other ; and, also, on the intermarriage of 
several brothers, own and collateral, with each 
other's wives in a group, these wives not being 
necessarily of kin to each other. It is designated 
by Morgan the punaluan family, from a Ha- 
waiian analogue. And he supposes it to have 
developed from the consanguine family as soon 
as the evils of close inbreeding came to be gen- 
erally recognized. And from it, as he holds, 
sprang the organized " Gens" — " the exogamous 
totem -kin " of McLennan — whose first germ con- 
sisted in the systematic exclusion of brothers and 
sisters from the marriage relation. 

Now, as there is a complete parallelism (which 
we have not here space to illustrate) between the 
relationships recognized by the Turanian system 
and those growing out of the punaluan marriage, 
it is inferred that the latter is the ground of the 
former. The Turanian system of consanguinity 
and affinity was universal among the North Amer- 
ican aborigines, and has been found in South 
America and Africa ; it still prevails in India and 
Australia. Like the Malayan, it survived after the 



228 Punaluan Family. 

form of family in which it originated had passed 
away. The form of family advances of necessity 
faster than systems of consanguinity, which follow 
to record the family relationships. And it takes 
something like a revolution to bring the system 
of consanguinity into line with the changing 
structure of the family. It was through the or- 
ganization into "Gentes" that the Malayan sys- 
tem was changed into the Turanian. But the 
Turanian did not undergo further development ; 
and being false to the evolving forms of the fam- 
ily, it was finally superseded by the Aryan sys- 
tem, which is founded on facts of consanguinity 
in the monogamous family. But between the 
punaluan and the monogamous family Morgan 
intercalates two other forms. The higher is the 
patriarchal family, which is founded on the union 
of one man with several wives, the entire house- 
hold being organized under paternal power ; and 
the lower is the syndyasmian or pairing family, 
which was founded upon marriage between single 
pairs, but without an exclusive cohabitation, and 
continuing only during the pleasure of the parties. 
The pairing family is a development of the pu- 
naluan, under the favoring influence of improve- 
ment in the arts of life, in house-building, in the 
means of subsistence, etc. And the patriarchal 



The Evolution of Morality. 229 

family springs out of the syndyasmian when 
pastoral life begins, with the holding of lands and 
the care of flocks and herds. Lastly appears the 
monogamous family, which must be associated 
with the rise of individual property and the de- 
sire of fathers to establish lineal succession to es- 
tates. As the form of the family has changed in 
the past, so must it in the future keep pace with 
the advance of society. But should the monog- 
amous family fail to answer the coming require- 
ments of society, it is impossible to predict the 
nature of its successor. 

Thus the theory of Morgan, like that of Mc- 
Lennan, reaches out into a past and a future as 
distant as each is hypothetical. Hence some of 
the objections urged against McLennan's theory 
are equally applicable to Morgan's. There is, for 
instance, not the slightest ground, apart from the 
exigencies of a theory, for the assumption of an 
aboriginal promiscuity in sexual relations, which, 
indeed, both archaeology and biology tend to dis- 
prove. And it may be reiterated, once more, that 
it is a gratuitous concession to our methodology 
when the facts of the world are supposed to ar- 
range themselves according to our mode of appre- 
hending them. We have no evidence whatever 
that all branches of the human family passed 



230 Morgan s Great Achievement. 

through precisely the same stages of develop- 
ment, either in general or, still less, in the details 
of their social institutions. This is the 7rpcorov 
tyevSos of the theory before us. And not only 
does this baseless assumption determine the ini- 
tial stage of the theory, it colors it from begin- 
ning to end. 

Nevertheless, it is not possible to deny the 
value of the facts collected by Morgan. It was, 
indeed, a stupendous achievement to tabulate and 
explain the systems of consanguinity and affinity 
of one hundred and thirty-nine tribes and nations, 
representing, numerically, four-fifths of the en- 
tire human family. And, in the comparative 
study of institutions, the facts, if rightly under- 
stood, are of vital significance. They become 
misleading only when, apart from history, they 
are supposed to tell us anything about the order 
of development of human institutions. Even if 
it were granted that Morgan's " conjectural solu- 
tion " of the facts is correct, and that the several 
systems of consanguinity really imply the correl- 
ative existence of several forms of the family, it 
would have to be conceded that there is no evi- 
dence of the whole human family having passed 
successively through all these stages, or, indeed, of 
any very necessary connection between the stages 



The Evolution of Morality. 231 

themselves. " They stand to each other in a logi- 
cal sequence " (p. 413), says Morgan ; and, indeed, 
that is just why we suspect them. They seem 
the creatures of successive logical determination, 
rather than the footprints of infant humanity. 
Some such acknowledgment is implied in Mor- 
gan's confession that promiscuous intercourse has 
not been practised " within the time of recorded 
human observation," and that it can only be " de- 
duced theoretically as a necessary condition ante- 
cedent to the consanguine family" (p. 502). 
And, again, the Malayan system, which expresses 
the relationships existing under the consanguine 
family, is pronounced the oldest form because it 
is the simplest (p. 403). Thus the consanguine 
family is really the starting-point of the whole 
system ; from it promiscuity is inferred to have 
preceded, and without it the punaluan family 
could notemerge in the sequel. I proceed, there- 
fore, to examine this crucial point — the evidence 
for the existence of the consanguine family, on 
which the whole theory depends. 

As a family organization, Morgan himself tells 
us it nowhere existed in historic times. The 
marriage of sisters and brothers, own and collat- 
eral, in a group, is, as we saw, solely an infer- 
ence from the Malayan system of consanguinity 



2 $2 Marred by Speculation. 

and affinity. That system is classificatory ; it 
groups all individuals of the same generation into 
a class and calls them children, or parents, or 
grandchildren, or grandparents, without further 
distinction than that of sex. Now, it must be ad- 
mitted that Morgan's hypothesis satisfies the first 
condition of any hypothesis : it is sufficient to 
account for the facts. But when we ask if it 
is in itself a probable assumption, or if taking 
promiscuity as established this form of family 
was likely to succeed it, it is impossible to an- 
swer in the affirmative. We must therefore seek 
a more probable explanation of the facts repre- 
sented by the Malayan system than the consan- 
guine family affords. A natural supposition is 
that the Malayan system of relationship arose 
solely from a poverty of language among savages. 
Some qualification will, however, be necessary in 
this hypothesis, since Morgan tells us that many of 
these languages are rich in discriminating terms 
of address. There is one word for brother or 
sister when a younger is addressing an elder, 
and another in the converse case. It must there- 
fore be admitted that their concrete terms, of 
daily and hourly use, are abundant and emi- 
nently significant. But may we not assume that 
abstract terms of relationship are scanty ? Is not 



The Evolution of Morality. 233 

that what our science of comparative language 
leads us to expect ? They are rich in concrete, 
poor in abstract, terminology. But what then 
follows ? Why, that this so-called Malayan sys- 
tem of consanguinity and affinity is not based on 
blood-ties (these not being, as later investigations 
show, facts of primary perception), and has noth- 
ing at all to do with any particular form of the 
family, but is simply a rough way of classifying 
all the generations which might ever be known 
to any individual. Under this system " brother" 
is not one of the same blood, "father" is not one 
who begets, " mother " is not one who bears ; all 
alike are descriptions of classes. Is there, then, 
no method of describing relationships nearer ? 
The objection implied in the question touches 
our hypothesis not more than the other. But, 
fortunately, Morgan himself supplies an answer. 
" A descriptive system precisely like the Aryan 
[i.e., the one we use] always existed both with 
the Turanian and the Malayan " (p. 484). The 
latter would therefore seem to be merely a classi- 
fication of generations, to which, naturally enough 
among communal societies, the same names were 
applied. 

Besides, Morgan's hypothesis does not give an 
unquestionable explanation of all the facts, though 



234 Mythical and Unsatisfactory. 

the contrary has so far been assumed. There is 
one part of the so-called Malayan system in regard 
to which his account does not satisfy me. If there 
are several brothers, A, B, 6 y , and several sisters, 
&, b, c, then, no doubt, in the consanguine family, 
where A, B, C, and a, &, <?, are intermarried, a's 
children may be called children of A and B and 
C\ and similarly of V% children and c's children ; 
but why should «'s children be called ?>'s and c's, 
and Vs children a's and c% and c's children a's 
and 5's, as they are designated in the Malayan sys- 
tem? Because, says Morgan, A, B, and C being 
husbands of «, their children by b and c would 
be #'s step-children, which relationship being un- 
recognized, they naturally fall into the category 
of a's sons and daughters (p. 410). But this is 
surely to attribute to primitive savages our own 
modes of tracing relationship, founded upon mo- 
nogamous marriage. And when Morgan observes, 
by way of proof, that "among ourselves a step- 
mother is called mother, and a step-son a son," he 
overlooks the fact that there is with us no other 
mother, and the father is always the same. Nor 
does the case have any analogy with that of call- 
ing A and B and C fathers. They are so called 
because, although only one of them can be the fa- 
ther of the child, any one of them may have been. 



The Evolution of Morality. 235 

and the paternity is supposed to be unknown. 
But there can be no doubt that a is the mother of 
her child, and that b is the mother of hers. Pater- 
nity is doubtful, because it is inferred ; maternity, 
being a fact of perception, does not admit of 
doubt. Why, then, does a's child call b mother, and 
V& child call a mother ? This cannot be explained 
by the consanguine family. But it is a species 
of relationship recognized in the Malayan system ; 
therefore, that system is not based on the consan- 
guine family. If, on the other hand, that system 
be supposed a mere classification of the genera- 
tions known to most individuals, then the term 
" mother " must be applied by a child to the 
women &, J, and 0, because they all belong to the 
same generation. 

With the disproof of the existence of the con- 
sanguine family, Morgan's theory of the devel- 
opment of marital relations falls to the ground. 
The punaluan family, by which he accounts for 
the Turanian system of relationship, is evolved 
from the consanguine by excluding own brothers 
and sisters from the marriage union. But if there 
never was a consanguine, there could be no puna- 
luan family developed from it. And, accordingly, 
some other account must be given of the Turanian 
system^of consanguinity. If we admitted the 



236 Facts Otherwise Explained. 

punaluan family as an explanation, it would be' 
open to most of the objections already urged 
against the consanguine. Excluding it, then, how 
are the phenomena to be explained ? It would 
be aside from our present purpose to enter fully 
into this matter. But as the main difference 
between the Malayan and Turanian systems lies 
in the fact that the one designates my sister's 
children as my children, and the other as my 
nephews and nieces, an explanation of the di- 
vergency may be found in the supposition that 
while the old classificatory system, in general, re- 
mained in vogue, it became modified under the 
organization into classes, through the separa- 
tion established between brothers and sisters by 
the system of reckoning descent and inheritance 
through females only. My sister's children be- 
long to her clan, mine to the clan of my wife. 
A new designation, therefore, was needful, when 
a rule broke up the old communal system in 
which brothers' and sisters' children all belong to 
the same group and, being of the same genera- 
tion, were designated by the same name. 

While the consanguine and punaluan families 
supply an imaginary raison (PHre for the Malayan 
and Turanian systems of relationship, the syndy- 
asmian and patriarchal families have not even 



The Evolution of Morality. 237 

such shadowy support. They are assumed, not 
because any particular system of kinship implied 
them, but because they mediated the logical pro- 
gression from the punaluan to the monogamous 
family. We know, of course, from history and 
observation that such unions have been practised ; 
but there is no reason, save the symmetry of log- 
ical development assumed in Morgan's theory, 
for making them universal stages in the progress 
of mankind. As they do not profess, like the 
other three forms of the family, to be established 
from systems of consanguinity, and are only spe- 
cies of logical determination of the punaluan, 
we need not consider them further. 

Nor is much comment required on the Aryan 
system of consanguinity and affinity. It differs 
from the preceding systems in being descriptive 
and not classificatory. It is founded on the mo- 
nogamous family, whose existence, known to us 
for three thousand years, does not need to be in- 
ferred from any system of consanguinity. This 
Aryan system is not, according to Morgan, a de- 
velopment of the Turanian as the Turanian was 
of the Malayan. It is an entirely different sys- 
tem, having no sign of connection with the 
others. Yet Morgan supposes that all peoples, 
now having the Aryan system, formerly had the 



238 Distrust of Theories. 

Turanian. This presumption is, however, largely 
founded on the assumption that the monogamous 
family is developed from the punaluan. But we 
have shown that there is no satisfactory evidence 
of a punaluan family. Morgan adds, it is true, 
that the "impoverished condition of the original 
nomenclature of the Aryan system," limited as it 
was to " father and mother, brother and sister, 
and son and daughter, and a common term ap- 
plied indiscriminately to nephew, grandson, and 
cousin " (p. 481), could not possibly have been 
the sole nomenclature of relationships used by a 
people in so advanced a condition as the Aryans ; 
and he therefore assumes that at that time the 
Turanian system was just dying out among them. 
But this is little better than begging the question. 
"What was there in the simple relations of primi- 
tive Aryan society that demanded a complex sys- 
tem of consanguinity ? There is no ground for 
supposing, as there is absolutely no evidence, that 
the beginnings of the Aryan system were syn- 
chronous with the disintegration of the Turanian. 
This protracted examination of the theories 
which have been furnished by Morgan and Mc- 
Lennan of the evolution of conjugal relations 
cannot fail, I think, to induce a sceptical state of 
mind in relation to all such speculations. The 



The Evolution of Morality. 239 

data are so scanty, the lacmice so numerous, that 
almost any hypothesis, it would seem, might es- 
tablish some claim to verification. Our informa- 
tion is made up of a collection of scattered 
observations on the marriage cnstoms of a small 
part of the human family. Moved by the scien- 
tific impulse, we attempt to discover their origin 
and causes. But if even in physical investiga- 
gations, where complicating conditions may be 
eliminated, we are always liable to error from the 
possibility of a plurality of causes, how much 
more so in dealing with social phenomena which 
are inextricably entangled and intertwined. The 
ignoring of this limitation is the weak point in 
the argument of Professor Robertson Smith, 
whose " Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia " 
is otherwise (if I may say so) a model of philo- 
logico-historical research. When Professor Smith 
lays down (p. 132) that " the very object of hy- 
pothesis is to inquire whether a real cause (vera 
causa) has not had a wider operation than there 
is any direct evidence for," his position may not 
be disputed ; but when he adds " the necessary 
and sufficient proof that this is so is the wide 
prevalence of effects which the cause is adequate 
to produce," he overlooks altogether the possi- 
bility, and, indeed, in human affairs the proba- 



240 Robertson Smith 's Logic. 

bility, of the same phenomenon having different 
causes. The " necessary and sufficient proof " must 
show, not only (1) the prevalence of the effects, 
and (2) the adequacy of a certain antecedent to 
produce them, but also (3) the impossibility of 
their being produced by any other antecedent or 
antecedents. This last all-essential link in the 
demonstration is what is wanting in current 
theories of the development of the family. And 
with the omission of it goes a corresponding 
neglect of the environment and circumstances, 
physical, social, and especially historical, in which 
any particular form of marriage appears. Iso- 
lating the various conjugal relations from their 
historic settings, in which alone an explanation of 
each is to be found, the theorist generally puts 
them in an arbitrary row, as one might string 
beads, and then asseverates that this linear ar- 
rangement of contemporaneous phenomena in 
space corresponds to the successive order of their 
evolution in time ! Meanwhile, no one knows that 
there has been such a universal development ; or 
that there ever was a time when all the forms of 
the family did not coexist as they do to-day. 

It would seem, therefore, that even the most 
conservative school of moralists need sacrifice 
nothing to the current theory of the evolution of 



The Evolution of Morality. 241 

the family. There can be no settlement of any 
ethical question by an arbitrary deduction of all 
forms of conjugal relations from a single imagi- 
nary source along a single imaginary path. No 
light is thrown upon the study of morals by an 
appearance of deriving historic from prehistoric 
institutions. Yet, in the study of the family, this 
unfruitful method has for the most part been 
followed; and from McLennan's "Primitive 
Marriage " to Lippert's recent valuable " Ge- 
schichte der Familie " simple facts are obscured 
by overshadowing speculative theories. "What 
forms of marriage now exist we know or may 
know; what existed in historic times we have 
some report of; but beyond this horizon all is 
darkness, and remains darkness, though Morgan 
and Lippert would fain conjure up the unrecorded 
past, and Letourneau in prophetic vision predict 
the course of the yet unborn future. 

It is not, therefore, with theories of the evolu- 
tion of the family that moralists have to reckon. 
Like other phantasies and bold guesses, these may 
be passed by. But it is different with facts — 
actual observations made within the historical 
horizon. These have a vital interest for the 
moralist. And it is the merit of the evolu- 
tionist to have recognized their significance, 
16 



242 Ethics need Facts, not Theories. 

though in general he managed to eviscerate it 
by adapting them to some extraneous speculation, 
cosmic or sociological. 

Many of the more striking facts known in re- 
gard to family relations have already been men- 
tioned in connection with the theories into which 
they have been woven. If these theories have 
been rejected, it was not from any desire to min- 
imize the revolting character of the marital con- 
nections between men and women in many savage 
or barbarous tribes. There is no evidence that 
every people once lived in absolute promiscuity 
or in consanguine families ; but it is a fact that 
among the Todas of the Neilgherry Hills the 
husband's brothers become husbands of the wife, 
and the wife's sisters become common wives of 
all her husbands. 

The custom of reckoning kinship through fe- 
males may not always have preceded the cus- 
tom of reckoning kinship through males, but 
McLennan, Bachofen, Robertson Smith, and Lip- 
pert have shown that it was at least a widely ex- 
tended practice. It is found among the natives 
of America, Australia, and Africa. It prevailed 
also in the ancient world. The Egyptians long 
held the mother's name indispensable; the Ly- 
cians, as Herodotus narrates fully, traced gene- 



The Evolution of Morality. 243 

alogies through mothers ; the Germans, according 
to Tacitus, considered the relationship between 
children and their mother's brother closer than 
that between children and their own father. In 
Hebrew, era, the word for " mother," also means 
K stock, race, community," and similarly with the 
Arabic om?n,omma; while in either language, 
again, the bonds of relationship are designated by 
a word connoting the " womb." And Professor 
Smith makes the highly original suggestion that 
Eve, "the mother of all living" (Gen. iii. 20), 
is "the universal eponyma, to whom all kinship 
groups must be traced back. Eve is the person- 
ification of the bond of kinship (conceived as ex- 
clusively mother-kinship), just as Adam is sim- 
ply 'man, 5 i.e., the personification of mankind" 
(Op. cit, p. 177). Lastly, in the " Eumenides " 
of iEschylus, Bachofen saw (like Gervinus with 
regard to "Hamlet") a tragic conflict between two 
world-epochs: the hoary age of mother-kinship, 
represented hy the Erinnyes, and the dawning 
age of father-kinship as announced by Apollo and 
certified by Athene in the judicial acquittal of 
the matricide Orestes. 

Along with mother-kinship goes the custom of 
a husband settling in the family of his wife. 
Livingston found an isolated example of it not 



244 Woman the Head of the Family. 

far from Zululand. The main features were 
that the man, in order to marry, had to move 
to the craal of his wife, promise constantly to 
provide the mother-in-law with wood, never un- 
dertake service elsewhere without her consent, 
and, in case of separation, leave all the children 
as property of the wife. Among ancient Arab 
tribes, the husband also went to the tent of the 
wife ; and when she wished to dismiss him (for 
he stayed at her pleasure) she turned the tent 
round so that the door faced opposite its former 
direction, " and when the man saw this he knew 
that he was dismissed and did not enter." And 
in Syriac and Hebrew, as well as Arabic, the hus- 
band is said to " go in " to the bride. It will be 
remembered, too, that the tent to which Isaac 
took Rebekah was "his mother Sarah's tent" 
(Gen. xxiv. 67), and that Sisera fled " to the 
tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite " 
(Judges iv. 17), and that Samson's wife remained 
with her people, and received there the visits of 
her husband (Judges xv. 1). These all embody, 
in a modified form, what seems to have been the 
universal rule of primitive marriage among the 
Hebrews: "Therefore shall a man leave his fa- 
ther and his mother, and shall cleave unto his 
wife" (Gen. ii. 24). 



The Evolution of Morality. 245 

But the custom of reckoning kinship through 
women, and that of men joining the family of 
their wives, do not imply promiscuous relations 
between the sexes, of which, as we have already 
seen, there is absolutely no evidence. Never- 
theless, there are found in the whole area of 
savagery, side by side with marriage relations 
and domestic virtues like our own, practices and 
sentiments wholly unlike, and even opposed to 
them. Nothing can be more striking than the 
variety of arrangements in regard to the sexes. 
Very frequently wives and maidens are distin- 
guished, and while conjugal fidelity is required 
of the former, no importance is attached to maid- 
enly chastity. Even in marriage some Arab 
women are bound for only four days of the week, 
being free to go with anyone they like during 
the off days. And once a year, on the night of 
a certain festival, a similar liberty was enjoyed 
by the wives of the Nicaraguan aborigines. 
Again, wives, as the property of the husband, 
might occasionally be put at the service of oth- 
ers ; and Cato's conduct in lending Martia to his 
friend Hortensius is nothing more than the laws 
of hospitality require among the Esquimaux, 
Greenlanders, and other tribes. Still, the rule 
is that the strictest fidelity is demanded of mar- 



246 Lax Fidelity. 

ried women. A Peruvian maiden might live a 
loose life ; but if as wife she were guilty of infi- 
delity, the punishment was death. A similar 
fate awaited the unchaste wife in Mexico, where 
divorce was reserved for such slight faults as bad 
character, dirty habits, and the like. Farther 
north, among the Comanches, the wife was pun- 
ished by cutting off her nose. Still, it is not pre- 
tended that infidelity was always regarded as a 
heinous offence. And, on the other hand, a wife 
might be divorced for much less weighty reasons. 
This brittleness of the marriage bond is a very 
striking characteristic of savage family life. 
Among the Iroquois and the Tahitians a marriage 
might be dissolved when either of the parties 
wished it ; but the right of effecting a separation 
generally inhered in the husband, who exercised 
it freely and often most cruelly. In East Africa, 
as in New Zealand, it consisted simply in turning 
the wife out of doors, to which the American 
Chippewayans added a "good drubbing." Prop- 
erty and children remained with the husband, 
though to this rule there may be found exceptions 
in the customs of the Dakotahs, Samoans, Kar- 
ens, and others. 

While restrictions are generally put upon mar- 
ried women, whose conjugal fidelity is the natural 



The Evolution of Morality. 247 

outgrowth of their position as property or chat- 
tels of the husband, the greatest laxity is often 
allowed to young unmarried girls, or even forced 
upon them. In West Africa there are public 
halls where every maiden is exposed prior to 
marriage, often for a period of several months. 
And the instances mentioned by Herodotus and 
Strabo show that among the Lydians, Assyrians, 
and Babylonians a woman was not free to marry 
till she had offered herself once in the temple 
of Venus. The Jews seem to have been ac- 
quainted with this custom, but rejected it (Dent. 
xxiii. 18). A somewhat similar usage obtained 
in the Balearic Islands, where the bride became 
the exclusive wife of her husband only on the 
day after the wedding. And among the Santals, 
a hill tribe of India, marriage is now brought 
about by turning all the young people promis- 
cuously together, and requiring them, after six 
days' license, to pair off as man and wife. Nor 
must it be supposed that such revolting practices 
are limited to marriage ceremonies. It would be 
easy to enumerate examples of female licentious- 
ness continuing throughout the entire period of 
unmarried life. But I think it will be enough 
to mention what was narrated to me last summer 
by a missionary who had spent several years at 



248 Maidenly Chastity unknown. 

Aneityum, and is now about to settle on Santo, 
both islands in the New Hebrides. Maidenly 
chastity was there, according to this unimpeach- 
able authority, an unknown conception, unlimited 
hetairism being the normal condition of every 
unmarried woman from earliest girlhood. And 
licentiousness had so colored their modes of 
thought and speech that it seemed impossible to 
initiate them into Christian purity without, at 
the same time, teaching them a new and cleaner 
language. 

It is facts like these that moralists, especially 
of the intuitive school, are called upon to face. 
Nor are these the only perplexing facts bearing 
upon the morality of the family. It must be 
recognized that among savages marrying is, for 
the most part, but the acquisition by the man of 
a new object of gratification, a chattel which may 
at once minister to his appetite and conduce to 
his profit. Wives are, accordingly, stolen or 
bought like any other property, though purchase, 
which is at least as old as the Iliad and the Pen- 
tateuch, is far more prevalent at the present day 
than capture. It is still the theory of Moslem 
law. Among certain savage tribes a man with 
several daughters is esteemed rich ; and when 
among such people infanticide is practised, girls 



The Evolution of Morality. 249 

are spared of tener than boys, as Dobritzhoffer re- 
lates of the Abiponians. And this conception of 
women as property naturally leads, were there 
not other motors, to polygyny. Tims Clavigero 
relates that among the Mexicans the possession 
of a large number of wives was regarded as a sign 
and proof of superiority. And there is similar 
testimony regarding many savage tribes, in which 
a direct relation may be observed between the 
means and standing of the husband and the 
number of his wives. In Ashantee the king is 
allowed by law three thousand three hundred and 
thirty-three. The king of Yoruba boasted that 
his wives, of whom some composed his body- 
guard, would, linked hand in hand, reach clean 
across his kingdom. And polygyny, though 
necessarily on a smaller scale, is practised in all 
parts of the earth — from the frigid to the torrid 
zone, over connected continents, and on solitary 
ocean isles. And as it prevails over vast areas of 
space, so it spans ages of time, appearing with 
the first dawn of history and flourishing to this 
day among a large part of the human family. 

To these deviations from our own marriage 
practices must be added examples of incest. 
These occur, naturally, in endogamous tribes. The 
Yeddahs of Ceylon had a custom, not yet ex- 



250 Incest. 

tinct, sanctioning the marriage of a man with his 
younger sister, though they held it revolting to 
marry an elder sister or aunt. The same prac- 
tice is found in the Sandwich Islands, where the 
king sometimes married his sister, as among the 
Peruvians the Incas always did. According to 
Hearne, the Chippewayans frequently espoused 
their own daughters, giving them over, after some 
time, to their sons. Other savages have certain 
bars to marriage, some of them corresponding 
almost to our table of prohibited degrees. But 
the field of choice for wiving is exceedingly va- 
ried. Where a tribe is at once exogamous and 
endogamous, and has at the same time no sense 
of consanguinity, there is no limit whatever ; so 
that a man's wife may be a remote foreigner or 
his own sister, or if he be polygamous, both may 
be his wives. If the tribe be purely exogamous, 
he may marry anyone outside it, except in that 
restricted exogamy which limits him to his own 
confederacy. And if the tribe be purely endog- 
amous, his choice is narrowed to its own female 
members, including or excluding, according as a 
sense of blood-relationship is developed or not, 
his own immediate kin and affinity. 

There are other peculiar features of family life 
among the uncivilized, which could not be omit- 



The Evolution of Morality. 251 

ted from a picture making any pretensions to 
completeness. But for a comparative study of 
the ethics of the family the details already men- 
tioned will perhaps be sufficient. 

This survey, brief as it has been, can scarcely 
have failed to generate a suspicion of the histori- 
cal character of those moral ideals which draw 
their nourishment from the relations established 
between the sexes. Were these relations every- 
where the same, our domestic morality would 
seem as ultimate and as final as justice or benev- 
olence. But it is despoiled of its absoluteness 
when the discovery is made that our own form 
of marriage is but one of several competing 
types, that the "relations dear of father, son, 
and brother" have different foundations among 
different peoples, and that chastity and fidelity 
are so far from universal virtues that many peo- 
ples have no conception of them, and when they 
have appeared they seem to have grown out of 
rights in women as property — adultery in Mada- 
gascar, e.g., having the same punishment as theft 
— and are consequently never, or seldom, required 
of savage men. The rights, duties, virtues, and 
sentiments associated with our idea of the family 
cannot, therefore, be considered a part of the 
content of the moral law universal. 



252 Opposing Ethical Schools. 

This seems to me a result of considerable im- 
portance for moral philosophy. And it is a re- 
sult that cannot be gainsaid by any school, since 
it is not a speculation, not even an inference, but 
an undeniable statement of actual facts. 

Moralists have divided into opposing camps on 
the question of the ultimate or the derivative 
nature of morality. While one party recognizes 
in moral laws nothing but means to ends, the 
other finds in them the expression of uncreated 
and unchanging relations, whose closest analogue 
is presented by mathematics. When this time- 
worn controversy is stripped of the accidental 
features by which party rage has heightened the 
contrast, it will be seen that these positions are 
not mutually exclusive. If a moral law is but a 
maxim for the attainment of an end, then, unless 
the theory is suicidal, there must be some ulti- 
mate end or ends for the sake of which maxims 
are enjoined; and this absolute object might very 
properly be described as eternally desirable, self- 
evidencing, and standing in the same relation to 
the conscience (which recognizes its authority) as 
a mathematical principle to the understanding 
(which recognizes its truth). In other words, the 
relativist cannot logically escape the admission 
that at least some moral principle or principles 



The Evolution of Morality. 253 

are intuitive, self-evident, and underived. And, 
as a matter of fact, the principle of universal 
benevolence has been so treated by relativists, at 
least since the time of Bentham. But the impli- 
cations of their logic have been hidden from 
themselves, through emphasis upon irrelevant 
issues. Holding the happiness of mankind as 
the sole ultimate good, they delighted to dwell 
upon the relativity of sundry virtues, and to 
show their emptiness and worthlessness apart 
from a tendency to promote the general welfare. 
And with still more ardor they proclaimed that 
the supreme good, or happiness of mankind, con- 
sisted in pleasure, which alone they declared 
truly desirable, if, indeed (as they generally de- 
nied), anything else could really be the object of 
human desire. Now, these highly speculative 
and dubious positions should not obscure to our 
view the underlying intuitional groundwork. 
Something at least is recognized as self-evident, 
primitive, and inviolably obligatory — the welfare 
of mankind. It is not, therefore, upon the ex- 
istence of primitive intuitions, but upon their 
number, that the difference turns between the 
relative and the absolute moralist. They agree 
that there are primal and underived moral prin- 
ciples; but they cannot agree in determining 



254 How Related and Contrasted. 

what they are. Universal benevolence, according 
to Mill ; benevolence, justice, veracity, and many 
others, according to Butler. But whether one 
intuition or many, the defender of either position 
is essentially an intuitionist. 

Still, though not so great a difference as has 
been supposed, a difference very real yet remains 
unadjudicated between the two schools. I need 
scarcely point out, at the close of this volume, the 
futility of submitting it to the equivocal arbitra- 
ment of many-voiced speculation. The results of 
this procedure are too sadly evident in the med- 
ley of personal prejudices, guesses, and vagaries 
that pass with us for ethical science. As specu- 
lation has its source in a personal need, and de- 
rives its form from the nature of the personality, 
so, as Lotze was ever ready to recognize, the sat- 
isfaction it gives and the validity it can claim are, 
primarily, only individual. But science must 
consist of propositions objectively established — 
valid for you as well as for me. Moral phenom- 
ena have hitherto been the subject of speculation ; 
and the contents of the moral law have been 
formulated according to individual caprice. Now, 
what I propose is that we shall pass by this fruit- 
less method and proceed scientifically to deter- 
mine the point here at issue — the nature of the 



The Evolution of Morality. 255 

moral law, the comparative primitiveness of moral 
principles, the derivative or inderivative character 
of morality. And after the methodological con- 
siderations in the first chapter, it will scarcely be 
necessary to remark that, in my opinion, the ques- 
tion can be settled only by an appeal to observa- 
tion and history. 

It may be objected that ethics deals with what 
ought to be, not what has been. But the objection 
ignores the fatal consideration that no science can 
determine what OUGHT to be ; that we know it, 
as a mathematical friend of mine is wont to say, 
in language as aptly expressive as Wordsworth's 
ode, only by "feeling it in our bones;" and that 
any speculation on the subject has no authority 
or validity beyond the speculator himself. Be- 
sides, the problem of the science of ethics, or of 
historical ethics, is not adequately described in 
the foregoing objection. That problem is, if not 
what ought to be, at least what man has thought 
ought to be. 

Unfortunately, data are not yet at hand for the 
complete solution of this scientific problem. The 
science of historical ethics is still too young to 
have established what moral principles are ulti- 
mate and fundamental — that is, what principles 
man, everywhere and at all times, has considered 



256 History as Arbiter. 

binding. But though it is not yet discovered 
what morality is primordial and universal, it has 
been settled beyond doubt that the so-called in- 
tuitionist school, or certain members of it, have 
erred in supposing all the virtues to be of that 
description. History and observation have alike 
demonstrated the absence of the ideas of chastity 
and fidelity in the moral furnishing of the minds 
of many savage and barbarous tribes. By follow- 
ing the same method, similar inductions might be 
established, until ethical science had completely 
made out the number and the nature of the prim- 
itive and universal moral intuitions. 

But though domestic morality is certainly a 
derivative and occasional growth, I do not hold 
that other important virtues have had a like 
historical origin. On a field in which there has 
been so little investigation, opinion, it must be 
borne in mind, cannot pretend to finality, or 
even to much solidity. But some gropings amid 
the general darkness incline me, at least tenta- 
tively, to the belief that, apart from the domestic 
virtues, there is no such great difference between 
the morals of Christians and the morals of sav- 
ages. Observers are naturally struck with what 
is new and unlike their own modes of thought 
and conduct; and so it often happens that the 



The Evolution of Morality. 257 

most superficial dissimilarities produce a pro- 
found impression, while the great body of com- 
mon morals escapes notice. This want of per- 
spective is manifest alike in the oral and written 
descriptions of travellers, as everyone will have 
felt who has tried to digest their information and 
arrange it into a distinct system. When I first 
inquired of the missionary, already referred to, 
into the moral condition of the natives of the 
New Hebrides, he described them as a gross, 
debased people with scarcely any sense of mo- 
rality. This is the popular view of the North 
American Indians, though it is certainly errone- 
ous ; and the reader of Parkman's brilliant vol- 
umes may suspect that one great social evil — the 
condition of the poor — they disposed of with 
more compassionate equity and with more success 
than their later civilized maligners. I found, too, 
on going into details with my missionary friend, 
that the New Hebridean natives, among w r hom 
he had spent many years, were, in their deal- 
ings with one another, severely just, scrupulously 
truthful, compassionate toward the wretched 
and unfortunate, so honest that an individual on 
going off to pay a visit of some weeks would 
leave his tent, containing all his possessions, open 

and untenanted, without any fear of theft, and 
17 



258 Christian and Savage Morality. 

that they were in general endowed with all that 
virile morality by which men regulate their con- 
duct towards one another and make living together 
in society possible. What, then, was the founda- 
tion of the missionary's general depreciatory 
judgment ? It was not a baseless verdict. His 
opinion had been formed in the light of an ob- 
servation that astonished and appalled him. He 
was surrounded by a community that had not the 
faintest conception of the virtue of chastity, and 
chastity has been so exalted and glorified by the 
Christian Church that its absence might well 
strike a Christian missionary as the collapse of 
all morality. 

It has now been shown that the morality of 
the family is varied and changeable. It has fur- 
ther been suggested that, when women are put 
aside, a remarkable agreement may be found be- 
tween the morals of savage and civilized man. 
But this last statement requires some qualifi- 
cation. The modern American owes duties to 
every man as man ; the primitive American owes 
none outside the circle of his own tribe. This 
contrast, however, is rather apparent than real. 
For, in times of war, Christian nations think it 
right to kill and plunder their enemies ; and the 
normal condition of the savage is one of war, 



The Evolution of Morality. 259 

with the rest of mankind as enemy. We may, 
therefore, say that under the same conditions the 
morality of savage and of civilized peoples is 
fundamentally the same. There is, however, a 
further limitation. Life has no sacredness^r se 
among many savages ; and children and old men, 
as useless members of the community, are, under 
the stern law of necessity or of custom, crystal- 
lized from it — frequently put to death. This, 
however, must not be confounded with murder ; 
since among primitive peoples children fall under 
the category of property, and are, therefore, like 
slaves or other chattels, at the absolute disposi- 
tion of the head of the house, as is very forci- 
bly illustrated in early Roman law. With these 
qualifications and explanations, our proposition 
in its final form may be thus expressed : The 
fighting men, actual and potential, in every un- 
civilized community recognize the same rights, 
obligations, and duties towards one another as 
constitute the essence of civilized morality. You 
never find man without a moral nature, a nature 
essentially like our own ; but the objects he in- 
cludes within the scope of its outgoings vary, and 
as women and children were (sometimes at least) 
regarded as property before they were regarded 
as persons, the ethics of the family may be called 



260 The Position of Woman. 

an acquisition or, better, an outcome, a late flower 
of the ineradicable root of morality. 

If, as Plato supposes, reverence and justice were 
the primal gifts of God to man, then it was not 
until there had been some tillage in earthly life 
that they blossomed into fidelity, chastity, and all 
the charities of the family. How this quickening 
of moral discernment is brought about we cannot 
always explain ; but the process of development 
may in some cases be actually traced, notably in 
the history of Rome. At the foundation of the 
city, wife-stealing was the practice ; this was fol- 
lowed by purchase and legalized dominion under 
jxitriapotestas / but in the course of several cen- 
turies the equal personality of woman came to be 
recognized, and Roman jurisprudence secured her 
a position as exalted as ever she has occupied 
in the history of the world. Her glory was of 
short duration, perishing with the fall of the 
empire ; but it has been regained under the in- 
spiration and teaching of a religion which pro- 
claims the infinite worth and, consequently, the 
fundamental equality of every human being, and 
which exacts in the relations between the sexes 
such perfect purity that all distinction vanishes 
between the look of lust and the act of adultery. 

As conjugal relations among mankind are not 



The EvohUion of Morality. 261 

of one but of various forms, and as at least some 
of them have undergone change and development, 
curiosity and, even, apprehension may be felt 
about the finality of our own sj^stem of monan- 
drous and monogynous life-marriage, with its fair 
train of sweet and pure domestic virtues. Is it to 
remain forever, or is it destined to suffer the 
common fate of those evolutionary potencies 
which, in spite of seeming fixedness, turn out but 
moments in the life of an eternal becoming, 
fleeting shadows of something that never is, but 
always strives to be ? To this question, answers 
have been given by evolutionists of a speculative 
turn of mind. And no objection need be taken 
to their intellectual gymnastics, provided only 
it is understood they are merely indulging in 
guesses concerning a matter which does not admit 
of even probable determination. One needs not 
to be especially sensible to what Bishop Butler 
described as the doubtfulness in which things are 
involved, it is enough to consider our absolute 
ignorance of futurity, to have the conviction that 
nothing whatever can be known about the com- 
ing development of society, or of any part of its 
organization. 

Our knowledge of the family is restricted to 
the period of its actual existence. This, surely, 



262 How Affected by Divorce. 

is a field vast enough for scientific cultivation. 
And of late considerable progress has been made 
in the investigation of the domestic life of primi- 
tive times. Much yet remains to be done in 
comparing, arranging, and interpreting what 
passes before our own eyes. It is a remark of 
Burke's that the generality of people are fifty 
years at least behindhand in their politics. And 
of social phenomena, still more than of political, is 
it true that men are " wise with but little reflec- 
tion " in the understanding of all times but their 
own. While we have been ransacking the past, 
and forecasting the future, a change is actually 
going on in the form of our own system of con- 
jugal relations, the significance of which seems 
altogether to have escaped attention. The effect 
of divorce, which has now been legalized in the 
greater part of Europe and America, has been to 
transform, within the area of its actual operation, 
civilized marriage into a casual bond essentially 
indistinguishable from that which formed the 
basis of what Morgan has called the " syndyas- 
mian or pairing " family— the family of the Iro- 
quois and other North American Indians. The 
legal forms, the technical procedure, the solemn 
plausibilities of the court, unessential and sub- 
sidiary as they really are, serve to hide from 



The Evolution of Morality. 263 

us the essential object to which these are but 
convenient instruments. The virtue, soul, and 
essence of the whole business is the existence 
among us of a family ethics admitting casual 
unions and separations of the sexes with the same 
facility and frequency, and with as little loss of 
respectability, as is wont to obtain among savages 
and barbarians. It would doubtless be considered 
paradoxical to declare we had become converts 
to Milton's theory of divorce. But, as a matter 
of fact, we have, both in practice and in legisla- 
tion, gone considerably beyond it. Every day's 
newspaper supplies fresh examples, and it would 
be musty to cite the now obsolete scandal of last 
week in the divorce-history of Rhode Island. 
Blind to the havoc which divorce is making in 
the old family system, we atone for our man- 
ners by embodying the principles of our fathers 
in denunciation of the Mormons. Unfortunate- 
ly, this application of our retrospective wisdom 
and orthodoxy serves only to distract attention 
from the anomaly of our own practice, which 
(if polygamy be the name for "much-marriage" 
successively as well as synchronously) may be 
justly described as essential polyandry and po- 

This change in the constitution of the civilized 



264 Science Indifferent to It. 

and Christian family, with the consequent ob- 
scuration cf domestic virtue, receives no counte- 
nance from ethical science. On the contrary, 
comparative and historical ethics show that the 
" pairing " family has hitherto always been as- 
sociated with a stage of culture immensely infe- 
rior to our own. And, from the interrelation of 
social forces, it might not unreasonably be ap- 
prehended that a return to the barbarous system 
of conjugal relations would entail general social 
deterioration. If ethical science does show that 
the family, and the morality of the family, have 
had an historical growth, and that they vary 
with time and place, it does not thereby really 
derogate from their sanctity or authority within 
a civilization that has once absorbed them. Sci- 
ence, indeed, can tell us nothing of the validity 
of virtue, duty, or good. And if speculation in 
the guise of moral philosophy takes up the prob- 
lem, it will find that the domestic virtues have 
the same warrant as justice or benevolence — that 
warrant being, in a last analysis, an inexpugnable 
consciousness of their right to us and authority 
over us. 



FEB -0 mo 




7 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 183 939 9 






■ ; 






m 



r ' ... 

rammQ 

.v.: waif 















